“On Monday, Cho Seung-hui killed 32 people on the Virginia Tech campus and then turned his gun on himself. There’s another tragedy slowly gaining momentum. This one is on the Internet. Yesterday, students created more than 100 Facebook groups dedicated to one cause – hating and insulting Cho, a man who is no longer alive.”
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On Monday, Cho Seung-hui killed 32 people on the Virginia Tech campus and then turned his gun on himself.

There’s another tragedy slowly gaining momentum. This one is on the Internet.

Yesterday, students created more than 100 Facebook groups dedicated to one cause – hating and insulting Cho, a man who is no longer alive. Some of them reference, and rejoice in the fact that Cho is now rotting in hell.

If there is one thing everyone can enjoy, returning hatred with hatred must be it.

However, this mentality won’t solve anyone’s problems. Hating the man who took their child’s life will not help grieving parents recover from their loss, especially since there is no chance for justice or restoration. Cho is dead.

Hating the man who attacked students and faculty on another campus will not make our campus safer, either.

In fact, it may only encourage prejudice or hatred of other Asian students.

Instead of focusing on hating Cho, we should focus on more positive efforts, such as comforting those affected and restoring harmony to a broken community.

And we could focus some of our energy on comforting Cho’s family as well – they are certainly reeling from Monday’s tragedy. Not only coping with their son’s suicide, they are dealing with the fact that he was responsible for the most devastating school shooting in U.S. history.

They could use our support. Instead of hating Cho, we should be doing the opposite for his family: caring for them. Imagine the reaction of Cho’s parents if they stumbled across one of the thousands of hate sites across the Web. Why respond to this tragedy by inflicting another on this man’s family?

These groups are focused around a person that most students across the country have never met – all because he killed more people that they do not know, which is rather strange.

I haven’t seen any hate groups pop up about the pilot who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, an act that took the lives of more than 140,000 innocent people. (If only Facebook was around in the ’40s.)

Surprisingly, I haven’t even found any hate groups about the soldiers who tortured Iraqi prisoners-of-war in Abu Ghraib prison. After all the groups dedicated to Cho, I was expecting to find at least one about them.

It seems that the same anger and hatred that are the driving force behind these groups on Facebook are the same distorted emotions that led Cho to do what he did.

It would be a shame if we didn’t take these emotions and use them for something constructive.

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