Alienated Examples

[HT: JerryBear at The Wittenburg Door's Chat Closet]

On the contrary, much of what we know about Cho and his descent into madness underlines the social character of the Virginia Tech tragedy, its intimate and all too painful connection to the present state of American society, both in terms of the eventual gunman’s own disorientation and the inability of the university system or community at large to care for him.

No can argue in this case that there were not warning signs.....

Numerous people individually attempted to help, but, in the end, the university system treated his difficulties in a pro forma manner, as it does in so many instances. The university could have done more, without question, but there is no institutional or police solution to generalized social alienation....

This is an extremely disturbed person, but it is clear, if one listens to his words, that conditions in society were playing on his mind. He felt many resentments. This doesn’t justify any of his insane acts, but the resentments have a real basis. He was mentally unbalanced, but that doesn’t mean there was no connection between social life and what he did. And now television analysts begin heaping abuse on his head, as a substitute for taking the problems seriously. “He was a coward,” and so on. This is almost a provocation, an incitement of others.

The resentments are real. Huge social divisions exist on a college campus. Snobbery and elitism exist. With Cho, the resentments were psychotically internalized and developed in a pathological manner. The society denies that social classes exists, it papers over social inequality. The contradictions emerge in a malignant fashion, they explode in this anti-social form.

[via World Socialist Web Site]