NIU Coping

NIU students returned to campus Monday after the university was closed for nearly a week following the tragic shooting last week. Faculty, students and parents are left to answer perhaps the unanswerable question: WHY?
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FROM THE DAILY HERALD:
http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=137620

Family and friends have started burying the victims.

Many of the wounded are healing, at least physically.

But five days after that bloody Valentine's Day at Northern Illinois University, it seems increasingly doubtful the public will ever know exactly why the gunman walked into a lecture hall and opened fire on scores of unsuspecting students.

How to Help
# MEMORIAL FUND - DeKalb and Sycamore business associations have established a fund to help erect a community memorial in remembrance of the five lives lost in Thursday's shootings. To donate, visit www.dekalb.org.
# MEMORIAL SCHOLARSHIP FUND - NIU has established a scholarship fund in memory of the five students slain Feb. 14. To contribute, visit webcluster.niu. edu/CreditCard/fdn2_step1.html or call (877) 448-2648.

Yet, those close to him say he seemed normal to them, and several teachers and friends still can't grasp that the ace student who studied social justice and the mentally ill was so troubled himself.

"He was kind, well-mannered, quick with a smile. He wanted to do his best," said NIU sociology professor Kristen Myers in an e-mail Monday. "Regardless, he chose an abominable path on his last day. His victims and their families were seemingly arbitrary targets, and I grieve for them."

Baty of Wonder Lake said she had no indication her boyfriend was having serious mental health issues. She said he was seeing a psychiatrist once a month and wanted to stop taking the anti-depressants because "he wanted to deal with his problems and not have to use medications."

Baty described her boyfriend as harmless, and that she didn't see anything wrong with him in the weeks leading up to the murders.

"I was with him all the time," she said. "How could I not have seen this coming? I feel partially responsible because maybe I should have seen something."
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One of the more troubling aspects to this story is that in the post event analysis, there may not be anything we can do as a society to prevent these types of things from happening periodically.

Sure, you'll hear the pros and cons from the gun control advocates and defenders of the 2nd Amendment. They will reflexively seek to capitalize on stories such as these to promote their agendas every time they crop up. That's the political reality.

But what troubles many people is, how can something like this happen and nobody sees the signs? It would make more sense if the guy was a prototypical Hollywood lunatic. One who the neighbors would say things like, "Oh yeah, we always new Johnny was going to go off. It was just a matter of time." But you never hear that. And while in this case--as well as the Virginia Tech case--there were signals that in hindsight would have provided clues that the perpetrator was perhaps a troubled individual, they could not accurately predict the tragic events to follow.

Perhaps the scariest truth is not that these events occur at all, but perhaps that they don't occur more often. How many other people could be described as "troubled" as the NIU student is currently described? Or worse. How many are struggling with depression issues and trying, often unsuccessfully, to find the answers with the aid of pharmaceuticals? How many times do we joke about someone having a bad day as being "off their meds"?

Maybe instead of this being defined as a gun control issue it should be looked at a mental health issue and the failure of Big Pharma and the medical community to come up with effective protocols for dealing with these issues effectively. That seems to be where these stories should be pointed but the public debate always seems to go off in an entirely different direction. Interesting.
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THOUGHTS ON GOOD VS. EVIL: HANNAH ARENDT AND "THE BANALITY OF EVIL"
http://www.radioopensource.org/hannah-arendt-and-the-banality-of-evil/

Hannah Arendt coined the term “banality of evil” while covering the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi official charged with the orderly extermination of
Europe’s Jews.

Arendt herself was a German-Jewish exile struggling in the most personal of ways to come to grips with the utter destruction of European society.

In a series of articles for The New Yorker that later became the book
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Arendt tried to tackle a string of questions not necessarily answered by the trial itself:

Where does evil come from?
Why do people commit evil acts?
How are those people different from the rest of us?

Her conclusions were profound:
People who do evil are not necessarily monsters; sometimes they’re just bureaucrats.

The Eichmann she observed on trial was neither brilliant nor a sociopath.

He was described by the attending court psychiatrist as a “completely normal man, more normal, at any rate, than I am after examining him.”

Evil, Arendt suggests, can be extraordinary acts committed by otherwise unremarkable people.

[Arendt] insisted that only good had any depth. Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any
demonic dimension yet — and this is its horror! — it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world.

Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from
which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.

In the past forty years Arendt’s ideas have been championed in two landmark psychological experiments — Stanley Milgram’s electroshock experiment and Philip
Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment — but decried by luminaries like Norman Mailer.

Even if the phrase itself has lost some of its punch through sheer repetition, the ideas it embodies are no less relevant. It’s hard to talk about real-world
horrors like the Rwandan genocide or torture at Abu Ghraib without referencing Arendt.

So for her centennial we’re reminding ourselves why her ideas still matter. Help us out by taking a stab at some of her initial questions:
Where does evil come from?
Why do people commit evil?
Do you buy Arendt’s thesis, or do you think there is something else (be it religious or biological) that leads to evil and distinguishes good from evil people?