The Chos Amongst Us

The harmless will suffer with the dangerous

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/Sociology/cho.htm
4/21/07

Back when we lived in southern California, my wife and I managed a small group of apartments. It got us a sizeable break on the rent, and for the nine years we did it, we only had one eviction (and I was amused when a year or so later I ran into him and he apologized for the events that led to his eviction). It was a good gig.

But we had one tenant who was seriously crazy. He spent some of his time curled up in a ball, lost in paranoid terrors, and the other half exalting that he could do anything. He had a sexual fixation on Billy Mumy, the then-ten-year-old child star on the old TV series “Lost in Space”. Some days he would play a warbly old LP of “American Pie” twenty or thirty times. Satan, or evil forces, were usually everywhere, and could be combated by eating only food that was white. He would talk about going out in a blaze of glory.

He wasn’t, as a rule, pugnacious or even particularly hostile. He didn’t make any direct threats, and in his calmer periods, could be pleasant, albeit strange.

But then he would go off on a screaming jag, and we would call mental health services and report that our resident 51-50 was erupting again, and they would haul him off for a “ninety-six” – a forced mental health evaluation at the local facility that was supposed to last four days and involve interaction, when possible, with a trained counselor. In reality, he would come back within a day, tranked to the gills and in a state of enforced lassitude that usually got him past the crest of his latest episode. This was in the 1980s, and County mental health – deficient as it was back then – was far better than it is today.

There really wasn’t much we could do. The fact is, it isn’t against the law to jerk off to thirty-year-old episodes of a bad TV show in the privacy of your own living room, and most of the neighbors understood the situation and were prepared to cut him some slack. He was on a month-to-month lease, which meant that I could give him a thirty-day notice at any time and not have to give a reason, but I suspected that would be tantamount to a death sentence, and he never quite crossed the line to the point where I was willing to do that to him. Now, if we had any children in the complex, that might have been a different story...

I mentioned his name once to an acquaintance who worked as a psychologist in the city police department, and he laughed, tossed back his head, and said, “Oh, one of the heavyweights!” Even in that fairly large city, he was well-known to the authorities. There really wasn’t much they could do, not unless or until he hurt himself or someone else.

But I watch for his name in the papers. As volatile as his situation was, I figured he was either going to wind up dead next to a dumpster, or he would be gunned down by police.

A couple of years ago I heard that he was still alive and in a more rural setting. I wasn’t sure whether to feel relieved or not.

I think that it’s the memory of that guy that stops me from jumping on the bandwagon of condemnation being made against authorities – both on and off-campus – for failing to act in time to prevent the massacre at Virginia Tech this week .

I feel a lot of sympathy for Nikki Giovanni, the teacher who recognized the potential danger in Cho Seung-Hui almost immediately, and her department head, Lucinda Roy, who worked to try to get him out of there before he hurt someone. I suspect that for them, the pain goes even deeper than it does for those in authority who could do nothing at all, because they have the pain of knowing they were horribly right.

But seriously disturbed people are pandemic in this society. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, 26.2% of Americans over the age of 18 – nearly 60 million people – have a mental problem that can be diagnosed. Nearly 15 million people suffer from major depressive disorder, and there are about 2.5 million people with schizophrenia. About 40 million people in the US have anxiety disorders, which may have been what afflicted Cho. Most of the severely mentally ill are homeless, and many receive absolutely no medical care. Many of them are veterans.

Cho, if he was psychotic, was a fairly high-functioning psychotic. He made it into a prestigious college, and kept his grades up there. He was, in some ways, in a lot better shape than our tenant down in the southland was. He was angry and disaffected, but he didn’t seem to have the cold, bleak emptiness of the true sociopath.

Sociopaths are the truly scary ones. They don’t usually make threats. Many get very good at appearing normal, even friendly. But some of them develop a taste for rape and murder, and proceed to do so, quietly and methodically. Most of them don’t get caught. They don’t shoot up schools, or climb towers in the Texas sun. The last thing they want to do is go out in a blaze of glory. I tend to doubt Cho was a sociopath, comforting as it may be to label him as such.

The fact is there are millions of people just like Cho running loose. Many of them appear threatening, but relatively few actually are threatening.

Most are like that guy down south. You know the capability is there, but in most cases, nothing happens. Some get treatment and some improve. Some even improve spontaneously. Others kill themselves, either directly with a noose or a bullet, or slowly, with a savage substance abuse problem.

The biggest problem the authorities had with Cho is that there’s probably a dozen just like him on campus, just as there is at any big campus, and none of them will explode and murder a bunch of people. Most won’t even hurt anyone, save through perplexing anyone who tries to get close with their anger and resentment.

Cho did, and we’ll probably never know why he blew up the way he did while the rest didn’t.

But the authorities will be pressed to do something about anyone who could be a threat, and in this case, the sad fact is the people who most need help from society will be spurned and alienated even more than they are already.

And the people doing it will do so convinced that they are building a safer and gentler society.