Wednesday, April 25, 2007

You Lose, Cho

Haven’t blogged in a while.

First, I was hit with the worst flu I think I’ve ever had. I mean, a week of literally not being able to do much beyond sit up in bed every now and again to make sure I didn’t get bedsores like an old woman with a broken hip.

That was the easy part.

Because then, April 16th rolled around. And my daughter goes to Virginia Tech.

She’s safe, thank anything and everything that can be thanked, but it’s obviously been rough. She’s handling it pretty well, though she’s certainly reeling still. But she’s a person who really has her shit together, so I know she’ll be alright in the end.

As the stories came out, it got more and more difficult for me. As I was telling my family recently, I read about these kids who were killed and I saw that they are all exactly like my daughter. They are her. She is them. The things written about them -- great kids, hard workers, good friends, big futures, smiles that stay with you -- that's my little girl. And she was doing exactly what they were doing, at exactly the same time, just a few buildings away. I try to suppress them, but these thoughts of what-if keep coming and it's horrifying. She was so close.

And then the media (who drove my daughter and her friends to additional tears, by the way, invading their grief in a mad scramble to break some new element of the story) started playing the message of the gunman.

I quickly stopped watching.

Because I will not give that piece of shit what he wants. I will not receive his message. I will not ingest his manifesto. I’m not interested in his story or what drove him. I do not care what his intent was. And I definitely will not accept his reasoning.

So fuck you, Cho. And I mean that sincerely. You are nothing. You don’t win. You don’t matter.

What you did matters, to the people killed and those they left behind and to your own family, for whom I feel great pity. But you, you don’t even get contempt. You’re already out of the picture. No legacy. Nothing.

And, by the way, since this is a writing blog, allow me to note that you were a shitty writer.

2 comments:

Emily Blake said...

Amen on the shitty writing. On the nose dialogue and too much exposition. What a loser.

Thank goodness your daughter is okay. Well, physically anyway. I'm sure she's not exactly over it emotionally.

glassblowerscat said...

Wow ... what a rough couple of weeks. But I'm glad to see that you're taking it exactly the way you should. You have my prayers.