The Unearthened Kryptonite, Superman and Seung-Hui Cho
We have the kryptonite. Now, where’s Superman?
The line between fact and fiction is getting thinner every minute. Last year, Superman fans all over the globe wished that their screen-made hero’s real. Several days ago, everybody wished the Virginia Tech shooting was just a piece of a madman’s fantasies.
But voila! We now have the kryptonite, a mineral discovered by geologists in Serbia, believed to weaken Superman. U.S’s worst shooting happened in a school. However, there’s something, someone missing… Tan-tanan-tananan!!! Superman! Where are you?
If Superman’s real, he could have saved the lives of teachers and students of Virginia Tech. He could have saved Seung- Hui Cho, the gunman. He could have saved the gunman’s family from media feasts. Superman could have…
Do we really have to wait for Superman to appear and save us from our miseries and horrible "incidents"?
We don’t need the cinematic hero (pardon me, Superman fans). We can be our own Superman and Superwoman if we want to. But most of us choose to play villains, consciously and unconsciously. Okay, let’s put the Virginia Tech shooting again into the picture.
What had happened to Seung-Hui Cho before the shooting is ordinary— a kid being bullied psychologically (who says bullying’s just pure physical activity?) because of his weird ways. And many people got shocked that he was capable of the shootings. No, I am not. Everybody’s capable of everything. You can’t say you can’t because you don’t know what the kid had been through. The kid probably waited for his action figures to come to life; he also probably waited for his schoolmates to rescue him from bullies; he waited for his Superman.
But no one came. He drowned himself in darkness where he played and cultivated his bloody thoughts with his shadows; in perversion that caused him to stalk women in his campus; and in writing where murder, rape, and gore ruled (hey, this kid could have been the next Edgar Allan Poe). With no hope of being rescued, he turned into a villain.
And what about his could-have-been-Supermen and women? Before the kryptonite was unearthened, human kryptonite already runs in our system and it is called fear.
Fear of being bullied or fear of whatever could have paralyzed the people around Seung-Hui Cho from helping him. They were afraid to be part of the kid’s hauntingly mysterious behavior.
Anyway, before I drown myself with the thoughts of Seung-Hui, let’s go further.
The Virginia Tech shooting can happen here in our country, in our province of Iloilo. Ooops.. I see some eyebrows arching! You say, "But our kids don’t have access to guns!" or "We don’t even have a gun!"
Dear parents, children are imaginative than adults. They are also fond of improvisation. Creativity will come into the way in the absence of the usual murder weapons. I won’t enumerate things here, your 10-year-old might read my blog and do what heaven forbids!
And to all kinds of bullies and pretending-to-be-bullies out there, stop what you’re doing! I’m not saying that you must turn into an instant saint! If you can’t stop (because bullying is addictive), then try to lessen it, you…
Don’t wait for more murders. Don’t wait for another kid to play God in minutes.
And the discovery of kryptonite doesn’t realize an inch of our wishes of Superman coming true.
