Sucks to be they

Apparently Cho Seung-hui's parents are normal, law-abiding, hardworking South Korean immigrants who came to the U.S. legally. I can already imagine some of the tongue-clucking calumny they are, doubtlessly, going to encounter over the coming weeks. All manner of stereotyped balderdash, mewling about supposedly work-obsessed Asians pressuring their children, etc. Au contraire: this youth probably terrified his parents and, I wager, they didn't have the slightest idea what to do. And they were also, in all likelihood, too busy working their asses off in their dry-cleaning shop, up to their eyeballs in solvents, to pay enough attention to their child's deepening psychosis. Chalk up yet another one to the Protestant--Calvinist, actually, since most Christianized Koreans are Presbyterian--work ethic. They worked their fingers to the bone, and as a result they could provide Cho Seung-hui with plenty of ammo money. But before you start tarring and feathering the parents in the kangaroo court of public and bloggial opinion, pause for a moment and consider how they must feel. How would you like to spend the rest of your life knowing that 'twas you who spawned the freshest face on America's mass-murder scene? Even if Cho's parents did pressure him to succeed, I daresay that this kind of overachiever wasn't what they had in mind. I've indulged in my own fair share of blaming my parents for my problems, but this rampage is another matter altogether.