The saga of the "loner," an old tale before VirginaTech.

By GERRY WARNER
Cranbrook Daily Townsman
It was the late 1960's and I was living in the men's residence at Simon Fraser University and I couldn't help but notice one resident who always kept to himself and wanted nothing to do with the rest of us. In the mornings, he would come down to the cafeteria for breakfast, load up his tray and then exit to the furthest corner of the cavernous hall and eat alone, always with some book propped up in front of him. The rest of us took him for some sort of a studious loner and didn't pay much attention to him. Being red-blooded young men, we were too busy swilling beer, watching hockey games in the dorm lounge and trying to strike up acquaintances with the comely coeds from the Women's Residence across the parking lot.
One day, when Mr. Loner came down for breakfast, he spilled something on the floor from his cafeteria tray and he threw a fit all out of proportion with the minor event. I witnessed it and thought to myself, what this guy really needs is a friend. So I set out to befriend him. The next morning at breakfast, I grabbed my tray of steaming eggs and bacon and walked over to the nether areas of the cafeteria and joined Mr. Loner. It was a little awkward at first, but he seemed to appreciate my gesture and eventually this became a morning ritual. Turns out he was indeed a studious loner deeply immersed in his studies of Karl Marx and dialetical materialism, nothing very unusual at Simon Fraser in the 60's.
Alas, the friendship didn't last too long. I can't remember the details, but I think it had something to do with an innocent comment I made about some arcane detail of Marx's theory and once again Mr. Loner freaked out and told me that "come the revolution" (and you have to understand that back in the 60's, especially at Simon Fraser, there was a sizable contigent of students, and more than a few professors, that really believed a revolution was coming) people like you Warner will be the first ones to be killed.
Naturally, I was kind of taken aback by this and our brief friendship ended then and there. I later figured out that Mr. Loner, like many Marxists of the time, really despised people they regarded as left wing, but insufficiently left-wing to be revolutionaries like themselves and therefore had to be eliminated in the Great Class Struggle to come. Not long after this, Mr. Loner disappeared, and wondering what happened to him, I asked around in left-wing circles on campus and was told he'd gone to Cuba to "cut cane." Among Marxists and extreme left-wingers in those days, going to Cuba to cut cane was akin to a religious act and the surest way you could demonstrate solidarity with the revolution.
Consider the foregoing tale -- harmless as it was -- my brush with the horror that engulfed Virginia Tech this week. My Marxist friend was unhappy, anti-social and somewhat unbalanced, but nothing like Virginia Tech killer Cho Seung-Hui, who was violent, demented and clearly unhinged. Cho was a stalker. His English "essays" were violent, hate-filled diatribes that caused one of his professors to threaten to resign if he wasn't pulled from her class and at one point the university had him briefly committed to a psychiatric facility.
In other words, the signs were all there.
But despite this, the suicidal, twisted young man filled with hate and loathing was allowed to continue with his "studies," -- the virtual equivalent of a suicide bomber in the midst of a prestigious public university -- until the inevitable explosion occurred and dozens of young lives needlessly snuffed out as well as the premature deaths of some older teachers and professors who heroically tried to stop the carnage. Hindsight is always easy, of course, but you have to wonder how someone so clearly ill and such a danger to himself and others could be allowed to remain at a university through his third year without someone blowing the whistle. Universities are "open" institutions and prize freedom and tolerance more than anything else and perhaps that's part of the problem. Where do you draw the line between free expression and expression that threatens the safety of the public square? Cho, in some of his "essays" clearly had done that prior to his murderous rampage. One of his so-called essays was about two 17-year-old students who harbour dark designs to kill their math teacher. Like duh. That should of sent a message to somebody.
And then there's the perennial isssue of Americans' sacred, constitutionally-guaranteed right to bear arms. Cho purchased his Glock19 and Walther P22 handguns a few weeks prior to what appears to be his premeditated rampage. And, of course, with Virginia's lax gun laws, the purchases took less than five minutes with minimal checking. But you know something, even with the much more stringent gun laws in Canada, we've had more than our share of school killings, the latest last fall at Dawson College in Montreal.
The evil in men's hearts -- and the school killers almost without fail are men -- is not easily overcome. I hate to say this, but we should probably be prepared for more Cho Seung-Hui's.
-- 30 --