By JAY AMBROSE
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
You sit at your computer working, occasionally scanning the news, and then you see the first mention of a Virginia Tech shooting, and it's quickly clear that something unbelievably awful has happened, something that makes the other news of the day seem like paltry stuff. Your stomach sinks, and you quit what you were doing.
You read and keep reading, and as you learn more about this mass murder of students, you find your sensibilities affected on any number of levels, starting with the terrible realization of how excruciatingly terrifying it must have been for those who heard a bang, bang, bang and suddenly grasped that violent death was stalking their young lives.
They hold doors shut, and bullets are fired through the doors. One professor heroically gives his life to help save them. Some students jump out windows two stories high and higher. Some do not escape and see this young man and his two semiautomatic handguns and are shot. The lucky are just wounded, though they will bear inward as well as outward scars for many years, maybe the rest of their lives.
Most of the university's thousands of students are not close to the classroom building where the killing is going on, but soon most learn about it, and frantically search out more information about what happened and how and whether they have lost any friends.
They have received e-mails about some of these events, but that is not enough. They want details and then, maybe, some of them are not so sure they want details. This they know: that some sense of the sane, the reliable, the regular has been at least temporarily shattered, and they cannot be sure when they will get it back.
You find yourself thinking that the terror of the students who faced the shooting was likely not much greater than that of parents who heard the news and didn't know if a son or daughter was safe, and who lost themselves in a sea of worry. For most, there was to be vast relief, although they may now feel less confident about that child's safety than before. For others, there was a notification and horror, and growing, inexpressible grief, and an emptiness that it might seem nothing can ever fill.
You next find yourself thinking about the person who did this. What was he like? What had his life been like? What were the immediate triggers of his behavior? What in the world was his mind like? How does a human being come to such evil, such an abandonment of all that is sacred and good and kind and merciful? Can science explain it, or is there a need instead for insights of Shakespearean dimension, the profundity of a great artist? Maybe both have a role, along with the explorations of philosophers and theologians. The killer killed himself. He will provide us no live subject for study.
Administrators, you suppose, must be in something approaching shock. They have never dealt with anything quite like this, and they may be bumping into self-doubts. There was a shooting of two people about 7:15 a.m., and they say they thought it was an isolated event and that the shooter had fled the campus. They let most campus affairs proceed routinely. Then the shooting of the others occurred two hours later. Might the mayhem have been lessened by calling off all classes? By now, administrators must at least secretly be asking themselves this and other questions, and they know that others are asking them in anguish, and they have to know further that they are in for the toughest time in their professional lives.
It is inevitable, you realize, that political arguments will arise from the event, chiefly about gun control, and maybe about a variety of forms of cultural callousness as background causes of violent behavior. Some will point to the thin veneer of civilization, although you also somehow feel a stronger-than-usual linkage with fellow Americans at times like this.
You also know there will be those who see in any such episode a lack of meaning behind the universe, an absence of God. You yourself see such a judgment as conceptually squeezed, and know that many besides you will react to the episode by clinging even closer to a spiritual narrative that has tragedy at its center and still offers hope and love and renewal. Out of sadness for the victims and their families, what you mostly want to do is offer a prayer for them.
(Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay(at)aol.com.)
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