April 16, 2008

We should all remember April 16, 2007 as though it was yesterday.

The morning began like almost any other on the campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, home of the Hokies. Students got up, went to breakfast, went to class, or went out for the day, blissfully unaware of the fact that, within mere hours of the start of their day, the worst tragedy ever to strike an American institute of higher education would take place on those very grounds, with the slaughter of 33 individuals by a single murderous student.

Cho Seung-Hui, a 23-year-old resident alien from South Korea who had lived in the United States for nearly fifteen years, apparently awoke that fateful Monday morning with one singular purpose in mind: to ensure that this day, decided by himself to be his last on Earth, would also be the last day of life for as many others as he could possibly make it..

His killing spree began in a dormitory, where, at 7:15 am, he gunned down an 18-year-old girl and a 22-year-old young man. Once the incident had been reported, the dorm was locked down -- and then the lockdown was inexplicably lifted, with no progress having been made at finding the two students' murder (the university police believed, without any evidence whatsoever, that he had “left campus”). Further, other than a cursory, uninformative email sent well after the fact,no effort was made to notify students of that double homicide.

Due in part to these mistakes, the two killed in the dormitory would just be the first of dozens slaughtered that morning.

Two hours later, Cho crossed the campus, entered an engineering building, chained the doors of the building shut from the inside, and proceeded to empty clip after clip of 9mm and .22-caliber ammunition into the students who filled the crowded classrooms, firing through doors, lining students up against the wall and executing them one by one, and aiming for anybody he could find in the hallways or in the rooms.

Students were reduced to barricading doors with desks, playing dead, and even jumping out of third-and-fourth-story windows to escape the scene of massive carnage with their lives intact. What those who managed to escape left behind was a bloodbath. When all was said and done, over sixty people were injured and, when all was said and done, over thirty were dead, including the killer himself.

Neither the campus police nor the administration deserve full blame for the massacre. While both are tasked with protecting the welfare and ensuring the safety of Virginia Tech’s student body, none could have imagined a murderous rampage of this magnitude in their wildest dreams – let alone adequately prepared for, and reacted properly to, such an event.

The very idea of such senseless killing is impossible to comprehend for the vast majority of people (in part, this is why so many in the West refuse to -- or simply cannot -- comprehend the irrationally, unquenchably murderous nature of our Islamist enemy in the War on Terror).

What could have driven a young man to such lengths that he turned to the vicious slaughter of his fellow humans as an outlet? We will likely never know; however, the content of the note Cho left behind, and information from classmates and teachers, combine to paint the picture of an exceptionally troubled young man who was alone, unhappy, and likely unstable -– in short, a young man who displayed virtually all of the warning signs one would look for if trying to identify a potential perpetrator of such a vicious act.

The fact that little or no action was taken to intervene in Cho's life before he committed this massacre will (and should) cause endless second-guessing for years to come, both of the university’s faculty and of the student support system in place at Virginia Tech. However, the most important action that can now be taken is to continue seeking to prevent such a tragedy taking place in the future.

The grief felt by the families of these students, professors, fathers, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, and friends was impossible to measure, or to put into words. As Nikki Giovanni, a University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech, said, “We are sad today, and we will be sad for quite a while. We are not moving on. We are embracing our mourning.” (Her later comparison of the students slaughtered that day to baby elephants killed by hunters was exceedingly pathetic and insulting, but her aforementioned phrase was well-put at the time).

Those involved experienced so many different thoughts, feelings, and reactions -- and those experiences did not stop for them, like they did for so many of us, when a brief time had passed and the massacre had left the 24-hour news cycle. How can people respond to such an unthinkable atrocity, to the act of such reckless hate? How can they cope with the senseless snuffing out of the life of a family member or a loved one, who had, until that fateful moment, simply been going about their normal life?

Many of us “on the outside” experienced our own forms of sorrow, rage, and disgust in response to this tragic event. Debates over gun control were re-ignited, with special attention being paid to a bill vo2ted down in the Virginia state House of Representatives which would have allowed students and employees to carry registered handguns on campus. A Virginia Tech spokesman praised the negative outcome at the time, saying that the bill’s defeat would “help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus.”

On the contrary; I do not wish to enter into a debate on gun control and the second amendment here, at this time and in this place, but had the bill passed, and even one student in that building been carrying a weapon on their person, how many lives could have been saved -- and, if the answer was "one," would that have been too few?

Pundits, politicians, and commentators offered their own observations on the situation at the time. On ESPN Radio’s Dan Patrick Show, baseball commentator and hall of fame player Joe Morgan lamented that, since this did not take place during football or basketball season, the students will regrettably be “forced to heal on alone” - and then had the audacity to compare this massacre of over thirty innocent men and women to the Don Imus scandal of the week before. This latter sentiment was echoed by Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama, who directly compared Monday’s “physical violence” at Virginia Tech to the “verbal violence” of the since-fired radio “shock jock.” Of course, Mr. Obama had no problem making excuses for the remarks of his pastor, who called on God to "Damn America" and spent twenty years cursing the White Man and the US in his church to a willingly listening Obama; however, a far less calculated and intentioned comment like Imus's was, somehow, the same as this slaughter to the perpetually muddle-minded Obama.

The aforementioned Nikki Giovanni's address at the vigil included the following statement:

We do not understand this tragedy. We know we did not deserve it but neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS, but neither do the invisible children walking the night to avoid being captured by a rogue army. Neither does the baby elephant watching his community be devastated for ivory; neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of the night in his crib in the home his father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because the land was destabilized. No one deserves a tragedy.

These statements are amazingly insulting to the victims of this act, and no greater purpose is served by the unspeakably pathetic comparison of the slaughtered people to baby elephants, or the equation of the senseless loss of life to the offending of sensibilities. Only in a society as soft and as comfortable as ours has become could such comparisons be straightfacedly drawn. The fact that such statements could be made are almost assuredly a sign of one of two things: (1) We have solved every one of our real problems, and are relegated to comparing hurt feelings and politically convenient statements to actual murder; or (2) We have buried our real problems so deeply for the purpose of focusing on petty little issues like hurt feelings and political correctness that Cho's act was simply a single vent of warning about the geyser (if not volcano) on which so many petty, pathetically weak personalities in our society are currently sitting.

Not all of the disparate developments and responses provoked by this tragedy were negative, though. For all too brief a time, the Virginia Tech family was brought together, albeit thirty-three people short, in a way that only tragedy could have accomplish. Ordinary people, going about their ordinary lives, with ordinary quibbles, complaints, and trials, had their lives forcibly put into perspective, and those in this nation who did not fall prey to the inexplicable and inexcusable urge to view slaughtered people in the same light as hunted animals or hurt feelings were made aware, once again, how precious life is, and how quickly -– and pointlessly -– it could be stuffed out.

From the ashes of such a horrific series of events arose tales of unimaginable heroism, such as that displayed by Professor Liviu Librescu, a Holocaust survivor and émigré from Romania who used his body to bar Cho from entering the door to his classroom, while being shot, so as to give his students an opportunity to save their own lives by exiting through the windows. As Powerline.com’s Paul Mirengoff so aptly put it at the time, “More than sixty years after [the Holocaust survivor’s] liberation, the rescued became the rescuer.”

Paul continued:

In a 1974 speech in which he introduced returning POW John McCain to the CPAC convention, Ronald Reagan asked where we find such men. He answered, “We [find] them in our streets, in the offices, the shops and the working places of our country and on the farms.” Professor Librescu's heroism reminds us that we also find them among those who come to this country from other lands.

It is difficult to put into words a personal response, or a personal reaction, to such heroism – or to the unspeakable act of barbarism which forced such people as Dr. Librescu to become the heroes that they became. As for the rest of the students and faculty in the vicinity, who acted to save their own lives rather than sacrificing themselves to save others, no ill can be spoken. An individual cannot be faulted for fleeing from danger, or for being less than prepared to act heroically in the face of mortal peril. Not everybody is created in the mold of a Todd Beamer and his companions on United Airlines flight 93; nor are they made of the same stuff as a Prof. Librescu, who had faced death so many times in the past, before rushing to finally meet it so as to stave off its arrival for the young people under his charge. This is not to imply that any of these men and women are lesser people for their acts of self-preservation; however, one can only wonder how many lives could have been saved had there been an active resistance on the part of students who were being lined up against the wall and executed, or who were jumping out of the windows to avoid the fate of their peers.

One fact remains above all others: a person never knows how they will react to a given situation until they have been placed in it, and those who have not been in such a horrifying, gruesome situation as those students at Virginia Tech faced Monday morning should be very slow indeed to judge the actions of those who were there. We all hope that we would react like Professor Librescu did; however, as a commenter at RedState.com put it, “Great people do great things. I like to say that in a moment of terror like that I would do the same thing, but in my heart, I don't know if I would have the courage.” Human nature being what it is, I have a hard time believing that many of those people who made it through the ordeal, while their classmates were perishing around them, will not spend at least part of every day for the rest of their lives reliving, rethinking, and second-guessing the events of that morning, and their corresponding actions, and wondering if there was anything they could have done differently – or could have done at all – which, though it would have placed them at even greater risk, might have saved the life of even one of their fellows.

I know that I would. Every day.

So let us keep in our thoughts, prayers, and memories those who were lost, and those whom they left behind, commit to remembering this tragedy and the lessons it teaches us.

Rather than stepping onto a soapbox and beating a political drum, a far more productive response to this event would be to continue following the lead of a Virginia Tech student, present at the scene of the killings, who wrote an email to his family in which he recounted the story told him, amidst the events of the morning, of her own ordeal, when she looked out into the hallway of the building where the murders were taking place, and came face to face with Cho.

"The girl told me that when she saw the shooter, she saw his face. She saw that he was sad, and she told me that she actually felt sorry for him. This didn't hit me right away, because at that time, everything was very chaotic. But after returning home later in the day and realizing the magnitude of this incident, I began to think about the girl's story and how personal this really was. I realized that this girl literally stared down the barrel of a 9mm handgun, but she looked beyond it and saw the man holding it. She had mercy on this man as he was threatening her life with his very presence. For the rest of the day, the death toll climbed, and I kept thinking about the victims, their families, and how this would affect the world's view of the school that I call my home. But still more, I thought about the gunman."

Then this student, in an act which we can only look upon in wonder, requested of his family that they “say a prayer for [the killer] by name.” He continued:

“Say a prayer for his family by name. Do not curse him, though you may curse this event. As Christians – as people – we are called to be merciful. I want to be as merciful as the girl I sat with…today. I know I will be filled with this inevitable feeling of anger, and maybe hatred toward this man when they announce his name, but I will put that aside, and I will ask God to bless the family that survives him. God loves this man as much as He loves the people he killed. So let us not pray for the 32 victims and the single gunman, instead let us pray for the 33 human souls that met God today.”

That this student, who saw the carnage himself, who lost friends, colleagues, and acquaintances, and who had his life changed forever by events out of his control, can approach the aftermath of this event with such maturity, serenity, perspective, and forgiveness should send a strong, clear signal to us all.

Using this anniversary to push pet, petty, and pathetic political causes is absolutely and inarguably the wrong thing to do. At Miami University of Ohio, "a professor and students in his men's health class" are asking male students to paint their fingernails red today as a means of "rais[ing] awareness about senseless violence committed by men."

Excuse me?

This goes back to the two-option diagnosis I presented above. Are we really (1) so devoid of real problems, or (2) so repressed, as a society that we can take an anniversary such as this, of an event which should have served as a wake-up call to a nation about a threat and the existence (and pervasiveness) of a mindset such as Cho's, and use it to try to make a pathetically invalid point about blood on all men's hands, while simultaneously using that symbol (in the form of fingernail polish) to encourage the feminization of the masculine half of our society?

Those of us with a modicum of perspective, who are even minimally in touch with reality, can do better than this. We can use this aniversary, and remember this event, in such a way as to learn from it, and to rededicate ourselves to the safety and righteousness of our people and of our society.

So, let us never forget the events of this tragic morning in April, 2007 – and let us come together as a stronger community, and strive to be better, stronger individuals as a result.