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20-20 HindsightApril 19, 2007 Sometimes after someone goes on a killing spree, or turns out to be a serial child molester, everyone in the neighborhood will say something like "He's the last person you'd think could have done this. He seemed like such a nice man." Not so with Cho Seung-Hui, the shooter at Virginia Tech. Everyone, it seems, knew he was screwed up. Some students were scared to go to class with him. Some say the university was negligent: somebody should have done something. Over the years I've met a few people who had more than a few screws loose, who either weren't wrapped too tight or were so tightly strung they seemed about to explode. It wouldn't have surprised me if one of them had "gone postal" and done something dreadful -- but to the best of my knowledge none of them has. I've known people who've seemed on the brink of suicide for at least ten years, and others who seemed to be coping quite well with their lives who killed themselves a few weeks later. Once the deed is done, I wonder what I missed; I reinterpret the signs. I suppose I could pick out a few individuals from my current circles of acquaintance and say "This one could go crazy; that one might commit suicide." Would I lay any money on my predictions? No way. Would I go to the authorities, any authority, and say "This person is in deep trouble -- this person is a menace to others"? I can imagine a situation where I might, but I haven't yet encountered one. I won't be too surprised if someday it turns out that I've underestimated someone's capacity for doing serious damage to him/herself or others. It'll probably turn out that I distrusted my perceptions, or dismissed them; or maybe I couldn't come up with any way to intervene that wouldn't cause major problems especially if I was wrong. I'll be kicking myself for sure, but I also hope I'll be able to remind myself that at the moment someone goes off the deep end, everything changes. A remote, or at least unlikely, possibility becomes a certainty. Some people treat every remote possibility as a probability, or even a certainty. These people are known as "alarmists." Say one of these people calls the police once a week about the suspicious person next door, and say that after checking out the suspicious household three or four times and finding nothing untoward the police start dismissing the caller as a crank. Five years down the road the suspicious person grabs a submachine gun, goes down to Five Corners, and starts shooting. The alarmist says "I told you so" and accuses the police of negligence. A person who jumps at every creak of the floorboards is no better a prognosticator than one who has a hunch but overrides it. Lately I've been driving around listening to a homemade CD of some women's music classics. One of them is Meg Christian's "Ode to a Gym Teacher." It takes me back: back in the old days quite a few lesbians of my acquaintance recalled a crush on a gym teacher or a camp counselor as their first inkling that they were lesbians. We'd flip cause and effect and pretty soon persuade ourselves that anyone who ever had a crush on a gym teacher or a camp counselor was either a lesbian or a closet case. As Meg Christian sang:
When I went to summer camp, nearly every girl had a crush on at least one counselor, and I would lay money that most of them grew up to be (mostly) straight. When lesbians compare our schoolgirl experiences, certain community archetypes tend to come up. The gym teacher and the camp counselor rank high in the pantheon. But that doesn't mean that most girls who have crushes on gym teachers or camp counselors will grow up to be lesbian, bisexual, feminist, or athletic. We're desperate for explanations, for identifiable causes that usually or invariably lead to certain effects. After the fact, the horrific fact, we'll try to understand why it happened, and we'll probably learn something in the process. We'd like to believe that it's possible to identify the next mass murderer before the fact. It's said that each peace treaty is written to prevent the war that just ended. Not infrequently it helps cause the war that hasn't happened yet. People are out there with the best intentions trying to prevent what just happened at Virginia Tech. With luck their efforts won't cause something worse.
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