Asian Journal- The Filipino-American Community Newspaper

Those children who are beaten will in turn give beatings, those who are intimidated will be intimidated, those who are humiliated, will impose humiliation, and those whose souls are murdered will murder. —Alice Miller

Unless you’re an ostrich with your head buried in the sand, you couldn’t have missed the up tick in the rash of mass murders and murder suicides in the early part of the year, in many places in the US. There’s a common thread—one man driven by rage, jealousy, paranoia, desperation, depression over economic pressures, family problems or just plain deranged, decided he can’t take it anymore and instead of committing suicide, decide to inflict murder and mayhem killing several others, either his own family members or total strangers. By last count, there were more than 7 mass murders committed by ordinary people since the beginning of 2009, with a total casualty count, including the murderers themselves, more than 60 before the first 100 days of the year were over. Is this a social trend? Pundits and talking heads predict that as the percentage of the unemployed continues to rise as the recession becomes more firmly entrenched, we can expect more of this type of horror. God forbid.

With each horrific case, the public seems to become more inured and desensitized to violence and death, becoming more accepting of all these,

as a normal feature of modern life. Ever since the Columbine mass murder perpetrated by 2 young misguided misfits garbed in black trench coats about 10 years ago, things haven’t been the same. There were copycats exhibiting lemming-like behavior since then. Evil glamorized by repetition and attention-getting drama seems to have morphed into many other incidents in North America and elsewhere, resulting in incalculable, untold pain and suffering among families of the victims. We remember with great pain the Virginia Tech mass murder which snuffed out the lives of 32, including Cho, the killer, who was a quiet, deranged malcontent who never quite fit in. In the blogosphere chatter, many noted that perpetrators of this troubling trend were often the quiet ones. Word is out on the street to watch out for the quiet "pressure cooker" types, those who never cause a ripple and yet, has a fondness for weapons, but who can implode and explode with volcanic intensity and wipe out those around them.

In the past month alone, a young gun enthusiast from Alabama, depressed over his life and who kept mostly to himself, killed 5 members of his own family and 5 other total strangers at random in a barrage of gunfire before taking his own life. A Vietnamese immigrant, Jiverly Wong, aka Vuong, a quiet, social misfit and also a gun enthusiast, driven by severe paranoia and frustrated over his "poor life" and poor English skills, gunned down 12 others in an immigrant center, 10 of whom came from 8 countries and who were students just trying to learn English as a second language. One was a Filipina, Dolores Yigal, a recent immigrant who was studying so she could find a job. One was a long time substitute teacher named Roberta King. One was an Iraqi woman who survived 3 car bombs in her native Iraq and left behind a devastated family, a daughter at the Sorbonne in Paris and another daughter, a Fulbright scholar. All these lives were cut off by one sorry excuse for a human being in one fell swoop.