Ismail Ax

This morning at work we had a fire drill, which started off as a giddy trot down the hallway towards the stairwell, and ended as somewhat of a downer. I had delightfully visualized all of us laboring down 19 flights of stairs, filing out onto Michigan Avenue by the hundreds, but was then told that all we were required to do was huddle around the fire marshal on the 18th floor. Some fire drill.

The fire marshal was a cranky Tommy Lee Jones impersonator and yelled at us like an insecure high school PE teacher. "Listen good, people!" he barked. "If you ever hear someone on the intercom ask you to evacuate the building without identifying him or herself as the fire department, IGNORE IT. PLEASE DO NOT GO."

When someone asked why, he replied, "Because a psycho may be waiting for you to come down the stairs, picking you off, one by one, with a handgun. Believe me, it's happened. 500 West Madison. December 2006."

Finding his fear mongering a bit ridiculous, I snickered, then stopped myself after realizing the entire room was quiet and somber. This was no laughing matter.

Obviously, everyone's still got Cho Seung-Hui on their mind.

People for the past two days have been pestering me to weigh in on this whole Virginia Tech massacre thing, most likely because Cho Seung-Hui's Asian, and so am I, and because he's written some pretty disturbing stuff, and so have I. I'm not sure whether to be flattered that people value my opinion, or offended that anyone would suggest that me and this monster have anything in common.

We've all refreshed our favorite news site repeatedly throughout the past few days, anxious for more updates, clues, answers. We've all wasted considerable hours of our workdays just to come close to comprehending what happened. So we all know: this kid was a freak. A monster. A self-absorbed aberration of society.

That's all that it boils down to. There are no shades of gray.

We'll learn about Cho's whole back-story in the upcoming weeks, but it's not going to do much more than appease our rampant imaginations and our alarming need to redefine the current decade's bogeyman. The reality is, his childhood does not matter. Many of my current friends were former middle school nerds who endured varying degrees of bullying, and yet not a single one of them have ever ever felt like shooting up a classroom.

And then there's the token "parents are to blame" statements. Yeah, the same bad parenting that somehow got his older sister to graduate from Princeton.

Honestly, this kid made up his own mind about who he was a long time ago, and there was nothing we could have done about it. Read all of the accounts of the shootings and you'll find people saying the same things. That he was calm. That he neither smiled nor frowned. That the look in his eyes was blank. This guy was simply inhuman, the Asian equivalent of Michael Myers from the Halloween movies.

Want answers? Watch Gus Van Sant's great movie, Elephant. Watch it and you'll conclude that there is no conclusion. This is going to happen again someday, only next time the shooter will look different. Next time, the nation will be shocked that it's not two white geeks in trench coats, or a creepy Korean with a name that everyone's afraid of pronouncing. Next time it might be a chick. Or a gay dude. Or a hipster indie music snob. I don't know.

It could be anyone.

Should we then simply accept it as the inevitable? Of course not. But we need to recognize that the solution is about more than being nice to the quiet guy in the back of the room from now on.

Before the end of the drill, when the fire marshal concluded his speech and asked if we had any questions or comments before being dismissed, I thought about pointing out that any fairly intelligent killer could simply just announce on the intercom that he is from the fire department, and that everyone playing this game of Simon Says could still be easily slaughtered like sheep as they passed through the stairwells. But then I decided that ignorance is bliss.