18 Year Old Eagle Scout Builds Peace Garden

I just finished reading an article in the NYTimes Magazine titled "That Other School Shooting" about a mass shooting at Oikos University in Oakland, California in April of last year.  The article touches on many things, not the least being the fact that very few people have even heard of the shooting.  Certainly not in comparison to Newtown, Va Tech, Columbine.

But what really caught me was a few paragraphs describing a young man named Kinsa Durst.  Mr. Durst, as part of an Eagle Scout project, built a Peace Garden on the campus of Oikos University.  Both Mr. Durst and the shooter, One L. Goh, are Korean.  So is the author of the piece, Jay Caspian Kang.  Mr. Kang explains Mr. Durst's motivations:

He said he built the gardens to help bridge the gap between Koreans and Americans in the Bay Area. When I asked him what he meant by that, Durst, who is half-Korean and speaks the language fluently, said he worried that the shooting portrayed Koreans in a negative light. “I wanted to show we’re not all the same,” he explained. I pointed out that none of the local or national news media had run a story about a rash of violent Koreans and wondered where he might have heard such talk. Durst said: “Well, there was also Virginia Tech, and now there have been two shooters who were Korean. The school wasn’t getting much support because of people’s bad perceptions, so I wanted to come and help.”

Pretty amazing kid.