Yearning to Blast a Hole in the World
Date: April 19, 2007
Time: 2:27pm est

Neither the police investigation nor the abundant public soul-searching has left us with an adequate understanding of what happened Monday at Virginia Tech. But when I read Lucinda Roy's op-ed in the New York Times early Tuesday morning, her words struck a cord. Roy has taught creative writing on the VT campus for 22 years. "None of us is safe," she wrote, "as long as there are angry young men who yearn to blast a hole in the world."

We know very little about the killer, Cho Seung-Hui. Was he mentally deranged by Monday morning? Reports say the university forced him to undergo a psychiatric evaluation in 2005 after complaints that he had stalked women on campus. Or, as Westchester Senior Fellow E. Christian Brugger speculates , was Cho's two-hour delay between killings a sign that he made his evil choices freely and deliberately? There is really no way to know with certainty.

One thing does seem clear, however: Cho was an angry young man. Very angry.

As I noted in a symposium on National Review Online on Tuesday , in the eight years since the Columbine massacre, we have had ample time to soul-search for answers as to how our society produces such angry young men. The causes are multiple. We immediately tell ourselves that some psychological imbalance must have played a role in at least some of these tragedies. But even then, we must ask: was that imbalance in-born and antecedent to the culture in which these young men lived, or on the contrary, was their mental state the final hellish cocktail produced after years of hidden hurts, buried anger, and black purposelessness?

In the cases of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold (the Columbine shooters) many of us were inclined to see at least these two young men as the tragic products of practical nihilism . Imbibed with a life of materialism, sensuality, and meaninglessness, Harris and Klebold coldly planned to massacre their classmates. Bereft of transcendence, and finding an escape from meaningless through massacre, these two young men sought, truly, to "blast a hole in the world"-and with their violence, to scream defiantly into the void of nothingness.

Of course, such speculation does not rule out the possibility that any of these young men was in a state of self-possession sufficient enough to render them the masters of their own choices and destinies. Was the VT massacre the result of a young man making choices in freedom and responsibility? Was he hardwired from his mother's womb as a pathological killer who could not escape his own genetically ordained destiny? Was Cho ultimately a victim of a despairingly secular culture of practical nihilism? Or was it somehow a combination of these? Such are the questions we would do well to continue asking ourselves.

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