The Bullied

(AP) - Long before he snapped, Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui was picked on, pushed around and laughed at over his shyness and the strange way he talked when he was a schoolboy in the Washington suburbs, former classmates say. Once, in English class, the teacher had the students read aloud, and when it was Cho's turn, he just looked down in silence. Finally, after the teacher threatened him with an F for participation, Cho started to read in a strange, deep voice.
As soon as he started reading, the whole class started laughing and pointing and saying, `Go back to China."

In incidents such as the Virginia Tech slayings, there is no single reason why a man to turns into a madman. But the way Cho's peers treated him is a factor.

Like Cho, I immigrated to America at an early age. Cho was eight, I was ten and we both had accents. In my case, that provoked sadistic glee from a certain percentage at Council Rock, a house of horrors that made the Stephen King movie Carrie look wholesome. Three decades haven't dimmed the misery of that shark pool-- a bovine-faced George Blackwell shaking me down for my milk money, the dwarf James Kilcoyne whose nose I bloodied after one tussel, and yet another greaser who threw me up against the lockers and was killed three days later with a knife in the ribs. Cho's sister graduated from Princeton, and I adopted the same strategy of escaping the bullies by excelling and achieving. The succession of failures and successes also increased my self-confidence and my generally boyant personality also cushioned me from the kind of despair that turned Cho into a psychotic murderer.

I have in my medical files the x-rays of my ten-year old son from 2003. It shows a broken clavicle-- a fracture of the collarbone admnistered by Michael Friedman, an especially vile classroom bully. I suppose it is both a right of passage to navigate the jungle of bullies but also a shock to realize that not everyone acts with decency. Whittaker Chamber's in his fine and frightening autobiography Witness recounts how in first-grade he watched a group of his classmates urinate on a lollypop and then offer it in innocent friendliness to a newcomer. "The watched him with birdlike intentness while he held it in his hand. As he put it to his mouth, they burst into shrieks of derision, doubled up with laughter, slapped their knees and whooped around him like Indians. I think it was at that point that I developed a deep distrust of the human race. It was not only the filthy act that disgusted me. Something else shocked me much more deeply: the thought that inspired the act, its absolutely unmotivated malice, and the complete boyish guileness of the faces watching the victim. From that moment I hated school and everything about it. I was always expecting somebody to offer me a lollypop in one form or another."

The Columbine killers were also victims of bullies. This shouldn't mitigate their crimes or in anyway diminish the human toll the murders exacted. But to prevent such actions from happening again, I think it behooves us to reflect on how we treat the Chos-- the most fragile and the most alienated-- that are among us. Ramping up on gun laws and inducing better living through chemistry doesn't address root causes of these human explosions. Nor do I think the answer is to eradicate mechanisms that differentiate the mediocre from the excellent, such as grades, honor societies, and wealth. But I do believe that people who for whatever reason are given advantages that elevate them in life should reciprocate by treating others-- including and especially the unlovely and the unsmart ---with kindness and efforts at understanding.