That is why there will be other campus shootings and other former employees who return to work with guns and children who grow up hating themselves and the worlds they believe they live in, feeling helpless right up to the moment they take it all out on someone.

And always, there are parents who see it, refuse to see it, don't know what to do about it, have tried everything in a country that doesn't provide much help -- or have given up. This is the point where we begin to whisper, lest someone ask about how we're raising our own children.

But we must go further. This is not a rant against the parents of Seung-Hui Cho, who come from a culture where quiet isn't weird. Both, until illness forced them to quit, worked at two dry cleaners near the town house they bought on a quiet cul-de-sac, according to a Los Angeles Times report. Most of the neighbors didn't know the Chos had a son. His sister excelled in school and in social relationships and graduated from Princeton. His mother wished that her son had gone to Princeton instead of Virginia Tech, her former employer told the Times.

The son attended one of the nation's top high schools with a football team that won the state championship when he was a senior. But he belonged only to the science club and, the Times reported, fellow students called him "Trombone Boy" because he carried the instrument everywhere he went.

In our America, where the louder and more obnoxious you are, the more successful you can become, quiet seems weird, quiet seems out of place, quiet scares people. But sometimes quiet means internal chaos. Sometimes quiet means your brain is racing around in circles so fast that you can't speak the thoughts. Parents cannot always be blamed, although in the Chos' culture, they take it.

So perhaps we can use this tragedy as an entry point into discussions that are necessary, overdue. There is no manual that tells you how or gives you warning signs that aren't generic. We won't know what's wrong if we don't ask. It's OK to ask whether everything is OK. Recognize when your child becomes withdrawn, sullen, not themselves.

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