(1) Nikki Giovanni is a poet on the faculty and she had been disturbed by Cho's writings. She tried to get him removed from the class and into help to no avail.
(2) University shootings have a LONG history. Moritz Schlick was a German philosopher and founding father of the *Werner Kreis* school of Logical Positivism who was shot in 1936 by a disgruntled student. The assassin was lionized by the Nazis because although Schlick wasn't Jewish, his name "sounded" Jewish and Logical Positivism was disliked by the few Nazis that had heard of it.
(3) Far earlier, the philosopher Peter Abelard was judicially tortured and murdered ostensibly for his relationship to the nun, Heloise.
(4) The anti-intellectualism of American universities, which the public insists on treating exclusively as a wealth creator, and which are continually subject to various forms of corporate exploitation, from university computer science departments forced to focus on MIS to Girls Gone Wild, created in Cho it seems a hopelessness that, as an Asian male, he would ever be accepted into American society as a man. Need I say this doesn't at all excuse his crimes? I guess I have to.
(5) When I worked at Princeton, my boss was disturbed at times by my anger on electronic forums including usenet, at the time in its infancy. But instead of remaining silent, she courageously intervened to discover that while I do have a temper, I don't know even how to fire a gun and in all cases prefer to write about things that anger me; she discovered I was taking personal steps to recover from a bitter divorce and the downsizing of Bell Northern Research. I continued occasionally to fright the ladies at Princeton because I'd "lose it" at incompetent software and curse my screen, but my boss considered me qualified not only to help Nash but also to mentor Princeton High School students who were misusing the Internet.
(6) Whereas the media, even before the shooter at VT was known, was carefully "othering" him in the approved style primarily to ensure the viewer that they were not at all like Cho, no sir, despite the fact that on THE SAME DAY, the tax dollars of Americans were responsible for the deaths of 150 Iraqis in communal fighting that was caused by the 2003 invasion, that was supported by 70% of Americans polled on the basis of what has been admitted to be a LIE.
(7) The interesting thing about the re-presentation of incidents like these is that while in the 19th century, when a Chinese student failed the Imperial examination and decided he was the younger brother of Christ, that same student was able to persuade his real brother and several million people to rebel against the Q'ing dynasty, whereas today the media, by design, represents anger at the system and Rage Against the Machine as an individual and atomic phenomenon.
(8) Angry men are re-presented in the media, and for this reason think of themselves, as profoundly isolated when in fact they could better deal with their anger by making common cause in labor unions and in social activism, but this gives the elite the willies, and for this reason, in W. H. Auden's words, we must suffer it all again.
(9) This incident is going to make my East Asian students' lives that much harder through no fault of their own, since they had, vis a vis Middle Eastern students, a slight advantage in that they were not associated in the collective mind of the Immigration and Naturalization Service as "terrorists", but, thanks to Cho AND the complete INCOMPETENCE of VT's administration, they will now be thought of as potential mass murderers. Which they are not: Cho could have been of any ethnicity because workplace and school shootings are sociology and not psychology.
(10) American culture is unique in isolating and in cutting off people precisely when they are emotionally or financially needy, and then blaming them for their problems. Cho was responsible for what he did but he's dead, and all the theatric "mourning" and religious posturing won't change a thing. Instead, students and workers in America need a New Deal.
(11) We simply don't talk enough about programmer unemployment, depression, suicide and divorce and as programmers prefer to talk about technology, in part because we haven't learned to talk about pain, and in an hegemony of the so-called American Dream, it's still unpatriotic, despite the evidence of our senses, to say that we just cannot make it, as contract programmers or working for corporations that continually downsize senior people simply to save a buck, despite the knowledge of those people...preferring software that's an unmaintainable mess to making Wall Street unhappy.
(12) Programmers are tacitly permitted to act out by making fun of their brother and sister programmers behind their backs, and mocking Sanjay or Vijay on the line in Hyderabad. But if programmers go in a body to their manager's manager and politely request extra time to finish a project right, many American companies will call the police, and the police will respond in force. Even in the Soviet Union, Natan Sharansky, an Israeli politician who was a computer programmer in Russia, was able to organize meetings with his Soviet managers to complain about the bonehead policies of his work unit as a group, but this is almost completely unheard of in America.
(13) Come from the shadows.