Virginia Tech

I don’t know what to write about Virginia Tech, but feel compelled to write something. My heart breaks for the friends and families grieving because someone they loved died in such a horrible and unnecessary manner. I am so intensely angry at that kid who… ugh, there aren’t words for him.

I also feel heartbroken for the thousands of students who will live differently now: less innocently; more accepting of fear. It's not as though this was the first event to chip away at their security either. During grade school, these students heard about Columbine; during high school, it was 9/11. So many Tech students are from the DC area and coped with even more: the duct-tape-and-plastic-sheeting suggestion in case of radioactive attack, the gloves for possible anthrax in their mail, the zigzag walking pattern advised to prevent a sniper hit. These suggestions became instant punchlines to adults, but at their root was a continual reminder of lurking danger. This was the time in DC when we'd casually debate the ramifications of a smallpox outbreak or nuclear attack, and this was their normalcy in high school. The worst news to travel around my high school was Kurt Cobain's suicide.

Several years later, many of these DC-area kids went to Tech and encountered an escaped armed convict on campus in August and the worst mass-shooting in American history in April. What do we tell them? Who can tell them not to worry, everything will be OK? They have come of age during the scariest domestic terrorism of our generation (with unusual attention focused on students: Columbine, the snipers, now this). For myself and most college students, high school and college were places of absolute safety and security. They were the real world on training wheels. We weren’t fearful for our safety but we assumed it, and everyone should have such luxury.

Soon, 4/16/07 will become every group’s Titanic: a giant, tragic metaphor only meant to prove various ideologies regarding gun control, censorship, mental health, and so on. Some of them will have good points; many won’t. We have to remember that for these kids, the day wasn’t a metaphor, but a real day when 32 innocent people died while sitting in their classrooms or dorm, and the innocence of thousands more disappeared. And all we can really say is, we’re so sorry.