More reflection brought to mind the story told by community development expert Jody Kretzmann from Northwestern University. He shared the situation: a diverse, busted-up neighborhood in Chicago was making progress in bringing neighbors together and improving their situation. Everyone was feeling good. Feeling like a community. Kretzmann challenged their good feeling with the question, "who in your neighborhood still feels like a stranger to you?"
Answer one: the police. Answer two went something like: the people who live in that house for crazy people. Indeed, neighbors were uneasy about recently discharged mental patients living in a group home.
Kretzmann reminded the assembled group that these people had unique gifts and contributions to make too. To make a long, compelling and emotional story short, the neighbors even succeeded at involving the one inhabitant who had in turn been marginalized by all of the other home's residents. His name escapes me, but this man of Polish descent had been relegated to a back room with barely enough space for a bed and no windows. He spoke to no one. For years. He was 'invisible,' to borrow a phrase from the VTech situation.
Within a year, this invisible Polish man had become a member of the neighborhood's championship all-Hispanic (except for him) bowling team. He had started talking again - some Polish, but all bowling dialogue was in Spanish. He had been brought back from invisibility. He was no longer a stranger. He belonged.
Could something like this have happpened with Cho Seung-Hui? On the one hand, Cho was severely defensive, angry, calculated, cold and mean. On the other hand, anything's possible. The question is, what kind of social capital do we need to foster to make it probable?
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