Very occasionally the mundanity of daily life is interrupted by something shocking and incomprehensible, something that is in the same moment gripping and numbing.On Monday, I was working on a radio news programme about to go on air as the terrible news from Blacksburg, Virginia began to filter through. A quick line was written before we went on air - "one person is believed to have been killed". It wasn’t long before that figure was revised; the new one revealed that the worst school shooting atrocity in America's history had taken place.
It is the stuff of nightmares and movies. A bright, but mentally unstable student, meticulously plans supreme slaughter that's crescendo is reached when a 9mm bullet ends his own life.
Cho Seung-hui studied English. Ironic then perhaps that he was such a failed communicator. He hung his head when spoken to, he lived a hermit-style existence and his work was so unpalatable that his teacher didn’t want to expose other students to it.
The origins of his anger are unclear. But what we can see on a home made video is a young man full of hate and uncontrollable rage. His words are incoherent, his unrelenting vicious chanting a kind of warm up – he had already killed two and was about to send 30 others into eternity.
As if part of some pre-ordained pattern we had breaking news, reaction, analysis and the gun debate, all within 48 hours of 33 deaths. The news trucks swarmed to the scene, there was little time for private grief, that will have to come later. They say everything is bigger in America and that goes for coverage of atrocities too. Families and friends were paraded before the cameras. Their feelings put on hold for lights, camera, action.
I spoke to a member of the teaching staff at the University on Tuesday morning. He described the town he has lived in for over a decade as a small community with the University at its civic heart. It is a community that we, on this side of Atlantic can easily identify with, and despite the fact that most of us will not have known anyone killed or injured, we still care. Over two hundred people died in Iraq the day after the shooting. Did we care?
The rights and wrongs of broadcasters showing the footage of Cho will continue to be a matter of debate. Does seeing him help us accept that this was a freak massacre by a crazed gunman that no-one could of stopped or does showing it give Cho is dieing wish – posthumous worldwide fame and notoriety.
These kind of incidents take their toll on all involved. For some students it will take years to come to terms with seeing a classmate carry out a ruthless execution, others will be forever haunted as they recall watching their teacher get riddled with bullets - prepared to pay the ultimate price to save his students. Cho’s family should not be forgotten. For the rest of their days these South Korean immigrants who came to find the American dream, will have to live with the nightmare that they brought a killer into the world. That will not be easy.
Weeks like this bring our mortality into the spotlight. People are resilient in these situations true, but only because there is no other option. If anything good can come of what we saw this week then perhaps it can be found in a changed outlook.
The silence after the bullets stop reverberating and the camera’s stop rolling is a chance to refocus our outlook, a chance to ask what is really important and a chance to search inside ourselves for what separates us from the mad man with his semi-automatic pistol who now lies lifeless in a Virginian mortuary.
Cho was unremarkable in life, but in death it is unlikely he will be forgotten. He is someone who loathed everything America stands for – yet it was that country's very own constitution that helped him carry out his callous crime.
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