Earlier this week, I again had the pleasure of reading about police beating protesters in an ex-Soviet Republic. And, as it did in the past two that happened in the previous three years, it usually means that a debacle is on the horizon.

The first occurrence I am speaking about is the "Orange Revolution" that took place in Ukraine. There was concern of voter corruption, Ukraine breaking up, a presidential candidate being poisoned and many other things that belong in a cold war era James Bond movie.

Afterward, because the Russian- backed candidate lost, Russia wanted to force Ukraine to pay market price for their natural gas (this is one of the alleged reasons for the significant price increase). They shut off that gas to Ukraine (and the rest of Europe) in the middle of winter.

Naturally, problems occurred. The world blamed Russia for using resources as political firepower and prices in Central Europe rose by as much as four fold (I was living there at the time and the hit hurt bad). Other problems piled on top.

Second occurrence: Belarus, March, 2006 -- Amid more protests over voter corruption, Belarusian police beat back protesters. Months later, dictator, rather president, of Belarus Aleksandr Lukashenko had a row with Russian president Vladimir Putin over imported Russian crude. The conflict resulted in Russia shutting off oil to Belarus.

Now the West doesn't trust Russia.

The latest happening: 9,000 riot police beat 2,000 mostly elderly people protesting against their low pensions in St. Petersburg on Sunday. A day earlier, Muscovites protesting against limited freedoms were beaten and detained.

What are my best guesses for what will happen after this? Maybe Putin will officially change his title to dictator.

Upon reflecting over this figure of impending conflict, I was left to imagine what it is that predicts these happenings in the United States. Until this week, I had no answer. After Monday, I believe I have one.

The first event happened eight years ago, today -- the Columbine shootings.

There are two significant things that happened because of this tragedy: The maturation of the polarization wars and the limitation of our daily freedoms (mainly speech and expression).

First, without the Columbine incident we would never have had Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine. The widespread knowledge of the disaster brought his pseudocumentary into the limelight and his biased "truths" took advantage of our society's main weakness (the lack of strong analytical skills) through fallacy and emotion.

His ability to expose the weakness was seen by others, who in turn exploited this Achilles' heel with other biased "truths." While the seeds of the ideological war of polarization were sowed years before, this war reached maturation among ordinary citizens through the mass media.

This tragedy was used as fuel for both sides of a political enterprise, which gets me into the second development that expanded in the aftermath of Columbine: zero-tolerance.

I first came to know zero-tolerance policies in the form of zero-tolerance against bullying campaigns in high schools. While I am assuming the intentions were apparently in good will, it limited a student's freedom of expression if it offended any other student. As an outspoken individual, I felt the repercussions of this policy.

As I remember it, it placed students on a watch list if they were seen as threatening, disturbed and eventually (due to how organizations with that kind of power act, look to the Russian example) if you actually said anything out of the ordinary or slightly questioned authority, you were scrutinized.

One only needs look at the recent 'Bong hits for Jesus' incident for evidence.

I see zero-tolerance policies as the predecessors to the Patriot Act. It is on a larger scale but inherently does exactly the same thing. These policies allow "The Man" to watch you if you act out of the norm in any way they can classify as threatening, then categorize you, and detain you if necessary.

Luckily, at some level, I saw the university system as a place where these laws were applied rather liberally, and that freedom of expression was still sacred here.

But, after what happened at Virginia Tech on Monday, I am very concerned for that haven. With the multiple threats already received nationwide, the university system is put into a Catch 22: How can they now not take those threats seriously and still continue ordinary life?

With national newspapers claiming that the warning signs were there (one being that the gunman had troubled writings so he was turned toward counseling services), it seems that everyone who exhibits these signs will, in fact, become a mass murderer. Where would we be if we locked up every individual displaying those 'apparent' signs? For every maniac, there is a plethora of success stories. What we must now do in remembrance of those victims is not let one extremely disturbed, yet isolated, man ruin exactly what these students and professors were working so hard to achieve.

What I can only hope for from this tragedy is that we have the vision to not allow the same things to happen in the aftermath of another such catastrophe. Those professors and students who stood up for our freedoms by applying them are important to this nation as our soldiers abroad in preserving our basic inalienable rights as Americans, and it would be terrible to let one bad seed ruin that for all the rest of them.

And, perhaps, in this time of mourning, that is the only thing those victims would have us remember.