And it starts

I would like to direct your attention to this article in the washington post. In it the writer compares the VT killers video images with John Woo and Park Chan Wook.
(Side note Park Chan Wook directed Old Boy and Lady Vengence and I absolutly adore his films so maybe Im a little touchy. Just a little. But if you haven't seen them you should. I guarentee there is NOTHING else like them out there.)
Because, you know, as an asian he must only watch asian movies. Right?
"Thus "Oldboy" must feature prominently in the discussion, even if no one has yet confirmed that Cho saw it. On the surface, it seems a natural fit, at least in the way it can be presumed that Cho's hyper-fervid brain worked. It's a Korean story -- he would have passed on the subtitles and listened to it in his native language -- of unjust persecution and bloody revenge"
Please agree with me that it goes with out saying that this article is racist?
But aside from the racism this article is just wrong.
I mean yes, ours is the generation of school shootings. And yes this epidemic would not have occurred with out the help of the media. By one person making it okay it is now considered a "valid" form of expression should your desire be to get your self on tv and go out in a blaze of gunfire. And now we have to deal with it for all time. Just like Hezbollah made suicide bombings valid and they soon spread across the world.
And yes, psychopaths often lack imagination and draw on popular culture or myth. That is the reason why copycat killers exist in the first place. People are stupid and unoriginal.
But they need to by psychopaths in the first place. And the world has always had psychopaths.
What seems to bother me most in the VT discourse, is all the talk about trying to stop the next killer. How do you pinpoint the killer next door? What can your school do? Blah blah blah.
Because ultimately there is nothing you can do. We will all eventually die. As Americans the odds are we will die from heart disease as opposed to violence, but there is still the chance of a dramatic end. Because people do horrible things to each other. Every day. All the time. Life is short and cruel and cheap.
And we all live in denial of that fact.
Which may seem horrible and nihilistic of me. But my point is ultimately this: what we should learn from the VT shooting is not that Park Chan Wook's visious and beautiful films cause violence. Or even teach violence. What we should learn is that we should cherish life while we have it. That even though we are so cushy and comfortable we are still fragile creatures. I mean, really, humans can only survive in a very small climate band surrounding the equator (without the assistance of clothes and what not.)
And we should learn to be kind. Because that IS something we can do. We only have power over ourselves. And maybe if made one other person's life a little easier that person would find the power to help themselves. Because ultimatly that is all that can happen. Manditory cousiling doesn't get that far when people are resistant.
So try to be kind? Maybe? Instead of blaming films, or playwrites, or koreans or whatever.
And that's what I took away from Old Boy and Lady Vengeance when I saw them. Even though they are tails of bloody revenge.

Update: this http://www.slate.com/id/2164753?nav=tap3 is a sort of stupid article on the same theme but the last paragraph is perfect.
"In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter a few years ago, Oldboy's director Park said, "My films are the stories of people who place the blame for their actions on others because they refuse to take on the blame themselves." And that's one of the smartest things that anyone's said so far about the motives of Cho Seung-Hui."