April 23, 2007

Virginia Tech: America Blames Quickly

Less than 24 hours after the Virginia Tech bloodbath, media were reporting that the parents of one student – not even one of the victims – were demanding that President Charles Steger be fired. We blame quickly in America.

A Tuesday morning news conference after the Monday shootings gave media members a spotlight in which to play cross-examining prosecutors – confrontationally demanding to know why split-second decisions about lockdowns and mass e-mails went this way instead of that.

By Thursday, the New York Times was taking the blame game to new heights with a headline screaming that a “fruitless” lead about the initial shooting of two people had distracted police from finding the real shooter before he entered Norris Hall and attacked the rest of his victims.

America has developed two predictable habits whenever something terrible occurs. First, we attack anyone we think maybe could have prevented the terrible event. Indeed, if there’s some way to envision that they could have, we attack them as though it’s beyond dispute that they should have. Actual perpetrators have nothing to do with this, you understand. Crooks are supposed to break the law.

Second, we demand that someone convincingly answer the question: How can we make sure this never happens again?

God help us if a Virginia Tech Massacre Commission, co-chaired by Tom Kean and James Baker III, is appointed. Assignment of blame is so much more authoritative when it’s signed by eight Democrats and eight Republicans, all of whom last had jobs around the time Ted Bundy was still wreaking havoc . . . and who did we ever end up blaming for that, anyway?

This is the dark side of a seemingly healthy thing we call accountability. Good accountability means people tell the truth about what they’ve done, and how well they’ve done it, then they work on improving where they need to. Good accountability means you take the credit or the blame for what you’ve done, and others take it for what they’ve done.

That’s not the kind of accountability we have in America anymore. What now poses as accountability is nothing more than recrimination looking for a target.

“Someone screwed up big time!” was the decree of one journalist on Monday evening. The thinking was that the university should have known after the dormitory shooting to put the entire university on lockdown, because, of course, double murders are usually followed by massacres of 32 more people. The university should have known that.

The Times piece was even more outlandish – implying that police screwed up by interviewing the boyfriend of one of the victims, someone who was known to be in possession of firearms. The Times reasons that while they were wasting their time pursuing this “fruitless” lead, they were giving the real shooter time to make his way over to Norris Hall.

Imagine what the Times would have said if the boyfriend had turned out to be the killer after all, but the police had not brought him in for questioning, explaining, “Well, what if he wasn’t the killer, and while we were talking to him, someone else got killed?”

Meanwhile, all over the nation, universities were forced to answer questions about whether they had sufficient security measures in place to prevent a similar incident. Presumably it is now acceptable for every university in America to put metal detectors and checkpoints at every entry point of the campus, and every doorway of every campus building. And to spend millions staffing these measures. Because if you don’t do that, you can’t “prevent” a massacre. You simply have to hope no one attempts one.

Asking questions is fine. Assessing your efforts in light of a calamity to make sure you’ve done everything you reasonably should is natural.

But we live in a world rife with evil, one in which the evil ones often make the rules. No one could have stopped Cho Seung-Hui from doing what he decided to do. No one can stop the next aspiring Cho from taking a rifle into your town square and doing the same thing. God forbid, if one does so, no one should be fired and no heads should roll. No one should be said to have “screwed up big time.”

I don’t know how society can more effectively deal with an obviously disturbed person like Cho before he becomes a homicidal maniac. But doing so is the only way to prevent more Virginia Techs. Even so, failing to do so is not a reason for anyone to accuse anyone – except the killers, of course – of being at fault.

If this is what now passes for accountability, I’ll pass.

This is Column # DC082.  Request permission to publish here.