Making Sense of a Tragedy
Brian Trent
April 18, 2007
Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia is 587 miles away from me. I've never visited its campus, nor had my thoughts wandered its way over the years. The 135-year-old school has more than 25,000 students, a distinguished faculty, and a varied map of educational offerings. Like many colleges, too, it has its own culture... like an enclosed colony where students, faculty, and alumni can steep themselves in shared experience that, years later, remain a deep part of their being.
Horror. Agony. Loss. These aren't the emotions any campus should have experienced, with a semester winding to a close and summer vacation on the horizon. Students awoke on April 16th with expectations of classes and exams; there were no prophets or seers to warn them how the day would turn out.
It was around 10 a.m. when, 587 miles away, I saw the first Internet report of a single shooting on Virginia Tech's campus. With a flicker of frown, I read the headline and went to work. It wasn't until lunch at my local diner that I realized, viewing the overhead TVs, that the morning report was merely a chilling prelude. I stood transfixed, a horrified feeling in my stomach, as the number of fatalities increased and the images unfolded in nightmarish tapestry on the monitor. All around me, customers and waitresses gathered, our faces upturned to the television, an ordinary day now steeped in incredible tragedy.
"We are sad today, and we will be sad for quite a while," writes University Distinguished Professor Nikki Giovanni on the school's website. "We are not moving on. We are embracing our mourning. We are Virginia Tech."
Predictably, everyone with an agenda callously piled on just hours after the news broke. This atrocity happened because of immorality in society, or the Iraq war, or video games like Grand Theft Auto, or homosexual marriage, or secret government mind control experiments... every Amway-style salesman who will see an opportunity to peddle their wares, to sink their pincers in with a flourish of irrational reactionism and prejudice.
But it's natural we should seek an explanation. In the unfolding days we will hear from psychologist panels poring over every line in Cho Seung Hui's notebooks, to see if an explanation is hidden there: his status as a "loner," his cold judgments of his classmates as "rich kids" indulging in "debauchery," his inhuman decision to become some old religion-style avenging angel exacting undeserved punishment on bright young lives. No interpretations will excuse the act. Nothing will erase the specifics of his monstrous campaign, from the point-blank executions to the way he chained the doors so none could escape.
We will listen to fanatics on both sides of the gun debate who cowardly refuse to meet anywhere in the middle for necessary discussion; those who want every American armed to the teeth for a replay of the wild west (ignoring the fact that the Second Amendment contains the term "well-regulated" with regards to the right to bear arms) and those who want every firearm plucked away despite the existence of the Second Amendment. They'll spin their wheels, they'll shout with red-faces in gladiatorial games.
We'll watch as the actions of the university are examined, particularly the unsettling fact that few students were even made aware that a lethal shooting had taken place on their campus two hours before the larger massacre. Why weren't they told? Why, with two fatalities on their hands, did they allow the day to proceed as if nothing had happened... until it was far too late? We'll wonder why Cho, whose works in a creative writing class two years earlier (taught by Professor Giovanni) had so disturbed fellow students that some started skipping class to avoid him, wasn't placed into counselor sessions. By all reports, this was a deeply disconnected 23-year-old who pathologically avoided the world... until earlier this week. People noticed. Why did no one act?
Understandably, we'll all want an explanation for this hideous two-hour chapter in Virginia Tech's history. I myself have been critical of mass media's hydra-like grip on civilization, but it did provide a searing window to the pain and horror delivered on Blacksburg. In that tormented wake, it allows us to see the victims' faces. To read their words. Most of all, to witness the stunning memorials crafted online by people all over the world.
There are no magic words of consolation to the victims' families or survivors. I sincerely wish there were. My inbox today was flooded from friends across the world, expressing their shock for what happened... for people they never knew... but people, nonetheless. We see their faces, read their stories, and become witnesses.
It took images on a TV or monitor to transport us there. It's a lesson of how when something is in sight, it is in mind. Perhaps this positive angle of media will shine onto other areas presently darkened in American consciousness: Darfur, Rwanda, the Balkans, Iraqi households, the places we rarely think of. When suffering is brought before us, it inspires our deepest sympathies, galvanizes our aid, and stimulates our desire to make improvements to our world.
"I am deeply saddened and shocked with the tragedy that happened at Virginia Tech. Our children should be safe at school," posts someone from New Jersey on Virginia Tech's site.
A poster from Washington writes, "We can grieve as one, as Americans not separated by race, sex, or religion... My heart breaks for you."
For whatever it's worth, Virginia Tech isn't alone in its mourning. You are in all our wishes, even if we're 587 miles away.
http://rosa.hosting.vt.edu/index.php/memorial/
Horror. Agony. Loss. These aren't the emotions any campus should have experienced, with a semester winding to a close and summer vacation on the horizon. Students awoke on April 16th with expectations of classes and exams; there were no prophets or seers to warn them how the day would turn out.
It was around 10 a.m. when, 587 miles away, I saw the first Internet report of a single shooting on Virginia Tech's campus. With a flicker of frown, I read the headline and went to work. It wasn't until lunch at my local diner that I realized, viewing the overhead TVs, that the morning report was merely a chilling prelude. I stood transfixed, a horrified feeling in my stomach, as the number of fatalities increased and the images unfolded in nightmarish tapestry on the monitor. All around me, customers and waitresses gathered, our faces upturned to the television, an ordinary day now steeped in incredible tragedy.
"We are sad today, and we will be sad for quite a while," writes University Distinguished Professor Nikki Giovanni on the school's website. "We are not moving on. We are embracing our mourning. We are Virginia Tech."
Predictably, everyone with an agenda callously piled on just hours after the news broke. This atrocity happened because of immorality in society, or the Iraq war, or video games like Grand Theft Auto, or homosexual marriage, or secret government mind control experiments... every Amway-style salesman who will see an opportunity to peddle their wares, to sink their pincers in with a flourish of irrational reactionism and prejudice.
But it's natural we should seek an explanation. In the unfolding days we will hear from psychologist panels poring over every line in Cho Seung Hui's notebooks, to see if an explanation is hidden there: his status as a "loner," his cold judgments of his classmates as "rich kids" indulging in "debauchery," his inhuman decision to become some old religion-style avenging angel exacting undeserved punishment on bright young lives. No interpretations will excuse the act. Nothing will erase the specifics of his monstrous campaign, from the point-blank executions to the way he chained the doors so none could escape.
We will listen to fanatics on both sides of the gun debate who cowardly refuse to meet anywhere in the middle for necessary discussion; those who want every American armed to the teeth for a replay of the wild west (ignoring the fact that the Second Amendment contains the term "well-regulated" with regards to the right to bear arms) and those who want every firearm plucked away despite the existence of the Second Amendment. They'll spin their wheels, they'll shout with red-faces in gladiatorial games.
We'll watch as the actions of the university are examined, particularly the unsettling fact that few students were even made aware that a lethal shooting had taken place on their campus two hours before the larger massacre. Why weren't they told? Why, with two fatalities on their hands, did they allow the day to proceed as if nothing had happened... until it was far too late? We'll wonder why Cho, whose works in a creative writing class two years earlier (taught by Professor Giovanni) had so disturbed fellow students that some started skipping class to avoid him, wasn't placed into counselor sessions. By all reports, this was a deeply disconnected 23-year-old who pathologically avoided the world... until earlier this week. People noticed. Why did no one act?
Understandably, we'll all want an explanation for this hideous two-hour chapter in Virginia Tech's history. I myself have been critical of mass media's hydra-like grip on civilization, but it did provide a searing window to the pain and horror delivered on Blacksburg. In that tormented wake, it allows us to see the victims' faces. To read their words. Most of all, to witness the stunning memorials crafted online by people all over the world.
There are no magic words of consolation to the victims' families or survivors. I sincerely wish there were. My inbox today was flooded from friends across the world, expressing their shock for what happened... for people they never knew... but people, nonetheless. We see their faces, read their stories, and become witnesses.
It took images on a TV or monitor to transport us there. It's a lesson of how when something is in sight, it is in mind. Perhaps this positive angle of media will shine onto other areas presently darkened in American consciousness: Darfur, Rwanda, the Balkans, Iraqi households, the places we rarely think of. When suffering is brought before us, it inspires our deepest sympathies, galvanizes our aid, and stimulates our desire to make improvements to our world.
"I am deeply saddened and shocked with the tragedy that happened at Virginia Tech. Our children should be safe at school," posts someone from New Jersey on Virginia Tech's site.
A poster from Washington writes, "We can grieve as one, as Americans not separated by race, sex, or religion... My heart breaks for you."
For whatever it's worth, Virginia Tech isn't alone in its mourning. You are in all our wishes, even if we're 587 miles away.
http://rosa.hosting.vt.edu/index.php/memorial/
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