Deadly Distractions

Who can look at the photos of the Virginia Tech victims--from those bright young faces to (astoundingly) a professor who had survived the Holocaust--and not feel real pain deep inside?

But then you learn about Cho Seung-hui's frightening history going back to at least November 2005. One of his professors thought him so dangerous that she repeatedly told university authorities about him. Students spoke of his "crazy behavior" and his obsession with violence. There was police involvement. Cho was taken to a mental health facility in late 2005. The General District Court reported: "(Cho is) mentally ill and in need of hospitalization, and presents an imminent danger to self or others as a result of mental illness, or is so seriously mentally ill as to be substantially unable to care for self, and is incapable of volunteering or unwilling to volunteer for treatment."

So how was Cho able to wander around for at least a year and a half (even to a gun store, twice) while his paranoid schizophrenia was so well known and thoroughly reported? Is our professional world that totally distracted?

And think about this: As MSNBC's Keith Olbermann reported last night, in the ten days prior to the 32 Virginia Tech murders, exactly the same number of US soldiers were killed in Iraq. But how much media coverage was there about those 32 deaths? And even if there had been lots of coverage, how many Americans would have really pondered the meaning of those deaths? Are we seriously pondering the deaths of 3,312 young American soldiers killed in Iraq as of tonight--and the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths? Maybe distraction is the national plague. And maybe it is already killing our nation.