My 2 cents (although I hear the dollar's not doing so hot these days)

I think like many Asian people, my first reaction was selfish. "Why does he have to be Asian?"

After that, I've been following, as best I can from overseas, what's been going down in America. More than anything, I've become disgusted with what passes for the media these days. Do I need to know that his parents tried to kill themselves? or perhaps they didn't, but they were hospitalized for shock? Do I need to know where his sister graduated from college? No, no, and no. Hell, I didn't even click on the articles but I already know enough to feel kind of dirty.

I've never really understood the "get inside the mind of the killer" news stories either. Has meticulously going over the Columbine gunmen's lives with a fine tooth comb brought us any closer to preventing something like this from happening again? Obviously not. Figuring out what was written on Cho's arm, or what movies he liked to watch probably isn't going to help us much either.

I think Kai Chang makes a good point to say that by spending so much time looking at things from Cho's perspective we are in fact doing exactly what he wanted. We're giving him the power to influence the world and our way of thinking.

Okay, I give, I watched his NBC video on the internet. People have been calling him an evil monster. I personally resist that. He strikes me as a really fucked up kid. I'll be honest, there have been times when I have hated rich kids as much as he did. There have been times I have hated white people as much as Kenneth Eng does. This does not mean that you go kill innocent people. I guess to do that, you have to believe that the people you kill are not really people. People do this and have done this all the time. People are doing this in Iraq right now.

I'm not saying what he did wasn't wrong. It was very wrong. But I think people are wrong when they say he's inhuman. People are clearly capable of doing terrible things under the right circumstances. Personally that's more frightening than one monster.