Seung-Hui Cho.

Surely that name knocks loose a spark or two in even the most desolate of American memories.

By the time you pull your morning paper out of the mouth of your neighbor’s friendly dog (who "never bites, they swear; something must have frightened the poor creature"), it’ll have been almost three weeks since those first reports came flooding in about an anonymous "tall Asian" leading a massacre across the grounds of Virginia Tech.

I know, I know; that’s a terribly long time for anything to hold the interest of the American public, especially when there isn’t any humiliation of public figures or famous men with firearms confusing their friend’s face with a quail’s (we forgive you, Dick; that darn morning sun must have taken up alliances with the terrorists again).

But please, dig deep into those yesterdays and bring the memories back; I’m about to tell you a story with one beginning, and so many endings that you can’t be count them on a 33-shot clip. Don’t worry, there will be scenes to keep you entertained at every twist and turn; the line-up will feature violence, drugs, sex, abuse, and even a musical number here and there, where it’s appropriate.

As you may or may not know, I am psychic. Calm down; put the tools and pitchforks back in the shed. Despite my tenacious denial, the fact remains that I possess about as much ability to read the future as Britney Spears did when she bypassed that 12-for-$10 panties sale on her way to the party where privates became public.

No one can read the future for the simple reason that it does not exist yet. Trying to read the future is like trying to watch movies on the radio; we’ve all tried, and it doesn’t work even if you bend the antenna backward.

Why should you care?

More importantly, why do I continue to insist upon hindering your enjoyment of your much-beloved Frosted Flakes? (Because they’re more than good; they’re great.)

Because whenever someone decides to play cowboys-and-Indians with real guns, we all might know who, what, when and where, but only the future has the answer key for why. Even better, the future promises that no matter how devastating the crime seems now, there’s always room for it to get worse. Perhaps reports would be published revealing that the body found was actually Cho’s long-lost-but-then-conspirator-with-Cho-on-preplanned-rampage twin brother, whose name is _ insert trumpets here _ Ismale Ax, and the killer is actually alive and well (and last seen heading toward upstate New York). Maybe he’d be an Islamic terrorist, because terrorism always explains everything. Maybe he ran into a dog that started whispering Satan’s commands into his ear as he slept; it’s happened before. Ask the Son of Sam.

Though Cho’s real-life horror novella might not have been particularly original in choice of protagonist or plot, he left us with one whopper of a cliffhanger; he didn’t tell us the ending. The drama should have wrapped up with blaring sirens, mental asylums and a biography that detailed his mother’s creative abuses of household detergent. But since a dead man can’t sign a check _ that is, a confession _ who’s going to shell out millions of dollars to students who were "traumatized" by hearing that 32 people they’d never met were shot on the other side of campus by an Asian _ what was his name again? Jackie Chan? Chuckie Cheese? Thirty-two Americans (Politically-Correct-Tyrant bless their souls) are dead. There has to be someone left to blame. Oh, but the future held so many choices on that Monday; it offered a virtual smorgasbord of factors that could be named as Cho’s puppeteer. The only question that remained was, what would the media and the bigwigs choose? Who would get paid? Who would be voted off America’s list of acceptable human beings? All this and more on the next exciting installment of Massacre Scapegoats: Virginia Tech.

One of the first to freeze up in the headlights was the issue of gun control. Politicians and reporters across the nation brayed about how completely unacceptable it was that someone had sold guns to a college student, much less an Asian one! Don’t those fools know how stressful college life can be, especially among a race of people whose fathers lay their feet in hot tar for every grade they get that’s below an A-plus? How could the gun industry not have laws prohibiting the sale of firearms to South Koreans, knowing full well the dangerous effects of both gun powder and a pizza-centered diet on an Asian’s bloodstream?

I really hope you all got the sarcastic intent of the above paragraph. For America’s sake, I really, really hope you did. Gun control is the only answer to preventing violence, right? Just like outlawing marijuana meant that no one in the U.S. would use it. The two ideas follow the same principle, which is that if something is made illegal, it will stop being used. The Columbine killers, Dylan and Eric, weren’t old enough to buy guns (and they didn’t buy them; not from a store, anyway). We all see how well enforcing strict firearms sale laws would have prevented the Columbine killings from happening, yes?

The truth, the only truth about killers and guns is this: If people really want a gun, they will get one. Yes they will. They will have someone else buy one, they will buy one from a dealer, they will break into someone’s house and stab someone to steal the piece from under their pillow. Maybe gun-control laws can keep someone with periodic fits of rage from shooting up a stranger who rubs them the wrong way, but someone (Cho) who is coherent enough to plan out a murder and buy the guns a month beforehand isn’t going to be stopped by a background check or a psychological exam. Legally or illegally, he will get a gun. End.

Cho’s upbringing was another favorite among the soothsayers. Apparently the boy (he was only 23 years old, so obviously he was at least a decade away from being called an adult) wrote several disturbed plays centering around violence toward parents and parental stupidity in general. Why did Cho hate his parents, the media asked? The answer’s a no-brainer: They locked him in a room with his dead baby sister and forced him to drink horse urine. "¦ Well, it is a no-brainer, but the lack of brains is on the trigger side of the gun. If one out of every 100 kids who truly hated their parents (with or without just cause) killed 32 people in their lifetime, America’s population would be about negative-15 million.

What else came under fire? How Virginia Tech handled the crisis. Since the students in Norris Hall were in class during Cho’s second rampage, they were essentially canned meat, with the classroom walls their container. Early critics complained that Virginia Tech did not earlier close the campus. What failed to come up in the critic’s response was the fact that if the students had been released, they’d have been milling in the college campus as uncanned meat. Supposedly it would have been better to give Cho a full buffet of victims than to divide up his choices by building.

The campus, the weapon, the killer’s home life, society, Communism, George Bush _ the future laid out so many possible avenues for the cause of the Virginia Tech massacre. And yet it took several days, several videotapes, and Cho’s mental background to lead the reluctant media to a simpler conclusion: Cho had been responsible for his own actions. This was a somewhat revolutionary idea, since in today’s world, it’s always the other guy’s fault. There always has to be an anti-Christ politician, a nation of terrorists, a money-grubbing company that can shell out big legal payments. It’s almost unheard of to think that someone who’s dead (and therefore can’t be punished with bombs or 250 years in the pen) can be responsible for his or her own actions.

And yet glowing among the accusations, this new theory seemed almost too logical to accept: Cho was a psycho. This seemed at first too simple for all the intellectuals who spent hours pondering the matter, but eventually no one could think of a better answer. You can pretty the idea up, insert some fancy adjectives, but that’s the heart of it. Mentally disturbed, emotionally stunted; he was a psycho. That’s why he killed 32 people and then himself.

He was depressed, isolated and angry, but so what? About 99.9 percent of people feel that way at least twice a day without attacking anyone, but he was the other .1 percent that wasn’t mentally stable enough to cope. He was the margin of error. There wasn’t anything to be done.

With the VT massacre has come the national wave of realization that no matter how we try to put childproof locks on all the more objectional portions of society, there remains an essential wickedness to humankind that can’t ever be completely eliminated. There will always be those few with the capacity to injure their own kind, to rape, to murder. In most of us, however, wickedness remains subtle; it shines in us every time we see the latest Iraqi death count and change the channel, every time we see someone bullied and walk the other way, every time we close our eyes to cruelty we don’t want to deal with.

The reason that we’re terrified to admit that a seemingly ordinary human like Cho could not only commit, but plot out murder is that if we do, we can’t foist the responsibility for our own small evils onto someone or something more obscure. If we dare to look closely at the causes of our suffering, we just might discover that the true enemy cannot be bombed or impeached, because the enemy is us.

Jessie Matus is a sophomore at Oneonta High School.