There are some days you wish didn’t happen. There are days when you feel you’re carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders. Not because of anything happened to you directly, but because you look at the world and can’t help thinking “What a messed up place.”

Tonight I go to bed feeling sad. Probably because of this week’s events at Virginia Tech. I seem to be more sensitive than the average person. I read Cho’s family’s statement and I cannot even begin to imagine what those people are going through.

Then another suicide gunman at NASA who took one life before ending his own. Then 12 school girls in Colombia trying to commit collective suicide by ingesting a deadly cocktail of pain-killers and anti-anxiety pills. Then a young girl dying after a mad man threw acid to her. And those are just a few of the many horrible things I read on the news.

Sorry to sound so grim, but what has the world come to? And how do we manage to keep going despite all this?

The videos of Seung-hui Cho, the man who fatally shot 32 people at Virginia Tech on Monday and then killed himself, shouldn’t have been released because they don’t offer the public any greater understanding of the gruesome crime, said Michael Welner, a forensic psychiatrist and ABC News consultant, on “Good Morning America” today. [ABC News]

I think I agree. Apart from the pain everyone at Virginia Tech is going through, now they have to show this deranged man being hateful. A reminder of who killed their loved ones, a reminder of the misery of the world. This sure doesn’t help, it actually scared the living daylights out of me, so I cannot even begin to imagine what the victim families felt like.

Releasing those videos on national TV was no community service. It didn’t help anyone to understand anything. Some things are better left behind the scenes. A social catastrophe indeed. I wouldn’t go as far as comparing this guy with a Quentin Tarantino character or telling parents to cut out the pictures from the newspaper, though. There is nothing to be done now, but it sure wasn’t nice.

Of course MSNBC didn’t care much for that. They had THE news. :P

That is the question everyone is asking about Seung-Hui Cho, the 23 year-old English Major that killed 32 people at Virginia Tech University yesterday, in what is considered the worst shooting in the history of the United States. My first thoughts about the news what “Great, another one!” — Then I stopped and thought about it… Isn’t it horrible that somehow we have grown used to this kind of tragedy? Like when it happens we are shocked, but not too shocked? Take it from someone who comes from a country like Colombia, where violence makes part of our daily lunch hour when watching the news. We have developed some kind of thick skin and we simply don’t get as shocked. Sad, but true.

I feel for the families and friends of all the innocent people who were killed in an atrocious act of violence, but I also can’t help thinking about the kind of thoughts that were passing through this young man’s head. What makes anyone so desperate or so unbalanced to commit such crime? What is so horribly difficult to deal with that the only way out they see is killing not only tens of people, but also themselves? What has happened to humanity that we have to see actions like this every single day. I feel nothing but sadness and I actually feel for this guy who didn’t see another way out.

The media is all over Virginia Tech University now, and I was thinking “What about the hundreds of people who get killed every day in, let’s say, Iraq?” — Then I realized I was just being my revolutionary self and that for one day I had to stop blaming governments and administrations. I actually got fed up with Fox News when I had to see this news anchor being so questioning about the school administration. They are looking for someone to blame, when the murdered himself is already dead. And now I wonder how is justice going to be done for all the families that lost a loved one? Blaming the system sure won’t help.

My thoughts are all scattered about this issue, but one thing I notice is that I simply won’t be patient with people being judgemental of cultures and countries. I had to read comments from a bunch of Colombians criticizing the American culture. This has nothing to do with the U.S. being the country it is, this is a global issue, unhappy people, violence that occurs EVERYWHERE in the world. So what’s next? Koreans being stigmatized for what this young man did?

Things like this should teach us a bunch of things I’m not going to list here. But I will mention that when the only solution there is for a problem or a personal issue is violence, we better stop and think about the kind of values we’re living with.