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More so than usual, the way the media is portraying the Virginia Tech shooter, Cho Seung-Hui, disturbs me. In the days after the shooting, we learned that in the 2 hours between when Cho took his first two victims and the absolute massacre during which he claimed 29 others and ended his own life, he managed to mail video recordings to NBC. Now NBC and other media are portraying Cho's final communications as the ramblings of an incoherent lunatic.

But he was anything but that. Cho's story is one that has become familiar now in North America. Cho was alienated by his peers in school. He had particular difficulties fitting in because of his ethnicity and English as a second language issues. Yes, in his final months at Virginia Tech a number of roommates and classmates tried to reach out and include him, but this was not until he had spent years feeling horribly unwelcome and alien.

I do not condone for one second the appalling choices Cho made leading up to the Virginia Tech massacre. I grieve for the victims and with their families. But we have to stop acting surprised when we hear that someone who has been bullied and excluded lashes out in the way that we have seen at Virginia Tech, Columbine, Dawson College and more places in North America than are now easily recounted in one space.

We will not see an end to these brutal mass slayings that seem to surface every 18 months or so, until we manage to construct a society in which everyone respects the otherness of the people they meet and live with. We also have to ensure that people like Cho, who are mentally unwell, do not slip through the cracks because they move around, change schools, or belong to institutions that are too large to identify and respond to their illnesses.

As people, we can put a stop to future massacres like these just by doing what we should have been doing in the first place: accepting people's differences, reaching out to those who seem antisocial and finding out just what factors may be making them so odd in the first place. Imagine the difference in the lives of both Cho and his victims had someone helped him at an early stage direct his passion for writing in a more positive way.

Learn more about this author, Russell Dawson.
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