pure evil?

This morning I read some quotes on air from VT poet/professor Nikki Giovanni, who's observations on the recent killings is personal; she taught the killer and had him booted out of her class for behaving strangely.

Giovanni sees no reason for people who had interactions with Cho to beat themselves up.

"I know that there's a tendency to think that everybody can get counseling or can have a bowl of tomato soup and everything is going to be all right," she said. "But I think that evil exists, and I think that he was a mean person."

Giovanni encountered Cho only once after she removed him from class. She was walking down a campus path and noticed him coming toward her. They maintained eye contact until passing each other.

Giovanni, who had survived lung cancer, was determined she would not blink first.

"I was not going to look away as if I were afraid," she said. "To me he was a bully, and I had no fear of this child."

Is it possible that some people just are evil, or are evil people made through negative interactions with society?

Much is made of the fact that Cho and the Columbine killers were bullied by fellow students, but surely there are many more stories of people who rose up and overcame the bullying of society and accomplished great and good things. Rosa Parks comes to mind off the top of my head.

Sad as it is to say, stories like the mass killing at VT are not privy to our time and place. It happens continually throughout history, back to the days before video games. It seems they occur at regular intervals, and the weapons vary, so it's not the result of handguns being prevalent, because apparently the evil people who want to kill will make their own weapons to accomplish their goals if need be.

This site tells of a guy who blew up a school in 1927 because he didn't want the high taxes. If you peruse this site, you'll find people back then only pointed their blame at one person: the guy who did it. You'll find they shared with us a desire to reach out and help the victims, and a desire to make sure we necer forget. But sadly, we did, as this event is rarely brought up.