Susan Rosenthal, The Virginia Tech Massacre

Cho Seung-Hui Delivers His Message
The Virginia Tech Massacre
By SUSAN ROSENTHAL, M.D.

So she gives a plausible psychological profile. But then she goes from the descriptive to the normative:

Individual violence should be no surprise in a world that promotes violence as the solution to every problem. When President George W. Bush wanted Iraq,s oil, he didn,t offer to buy it; he didn,t negotiate for it; he took it by brute force, using the flimsiest excuses. The mass slaughter he launched has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. Given the savagery of those in power, it is amazing that more young people are not violent, that so many organize against injustice and for a better world.

This tragedy will be used to promote more police and tighter security measures. In fact, racism kills 50 times more Americans every year than die at the hands of individual murderers. To preserve this unjust but highly profitable system, the ruling class needs to crush those who rebel and intimidate everyone else. This is the opposite of what is needed.

We don,t need more ways to "manage" anger and punish angry people. We need to abolish the injustice that provokes anger. We need to create a world where everyone has equal worth, a caring society where the top priority is relieving human suffering. Profit-driven capitalism cannot do this. We need to build a socialist society that puts people first.

Most important, we need to support our youth, publicly and visibly. They need to know that they are not alone " that we also see the unfairness that they see, that we also know how intolerable that unfairness feels. They need to know that we share their outrage and the urgent need for change. Their future and ours depends on us pulling together.

This is just... I need to use adjectives other than ridiculous, unbelievable, incredible...

How about stupid?

Anger as an emotional response to injustice is understandable, even right. But to go from anger to committing injustice? That is wrong, and all reasonable people admit this. Anger is not the problem here, and even if Dr. Rosenthal can guess what Cho's emotional state was that lead up to the attack (and I wonder if she can fully account for everything), the point is that her solution is not a solution at all. Socialism will not remedy bigotry, it will merely increase the power of the state. But perhaps it is to be expected that liberals who give a somewhat materialistic view of human psychology and therapy will find the ideal solution in the government imposing change from above.

What is needed is conversion of hearts, and statists know nothing about this. They go ever farther than those who hold to a traditional "natural law jurisprudence" and recognize that there are limits to what law and government can do with respect to moral education.