RSS Feed
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
No explanation for Virginia Tech tragedy
My daughter, Maggie, is only 8 and in elementary school but I try to relate these students to her. They were older, in their late teens and early 20s but to a parent a child is always a child. Heck, I'm 51 and still my mama's baby! Watching CNN Tuesday I had to blink back a tear when a father told reporters that his daughter had died of injuries sustained Monday. "My baby didn't make it," he said. Another father was interviewed talking about his slain daughter's zest for life and her ambitions for the future. How could he be so composed, I wondered? He said it was therapeutic to talk and to let others know about her wonderful life. He admitted that his wife was having a harder time with her grief. We learned in bits and pieces Tuesday of the killer, Cho Seung- Hui, a 23-year-old senior who emigrated from South Korea as a child with his family. To say he was a troubled young man is a gross understatement, especially knowing what we know now. A professor at Virginia Tech was so disturbed by the brutal, bloody plays that Cho, an English major, wrote, that she suggested him for counseling. Students recalled him as a loner. There are people walking among us every day who are, as we would nicely say, "a little odd." Then there are those with severe problems like Cho who are truly dangerous madmen and a threat to society but who too often go undetected. The one blessing, I suppose, is that such people are in the minority. Or so I hope. The sad truth is that we usually don't recognize truly dangerous people like Cho until it is too late. Then everyone, as they are doing now, wonders why it wasn't obvious that the person was a threat and why something wasn't done. Virginia Tech officials have been blamed for not doing something about Cho and for not notifying students early that morning of his first two killings at a campus dormitory. It would be two hours later before he struck again, killing 30 in a classroom building where he chained and locked the doors so no one could escape, and so rescuers couldn't get in. I won't defend Tech leaders but I will say that in instances like this hindsight is far clearer than actions when the events are unfolding. Even though Cho was a loner and wrote disturbing plays, who would have thought he would methodically murder 32 fellow students? Law enforcement officers' actions are also being questioned but after finding the first two dead students in a dorm that morning they probably thought it a tragic but isolated incident. They had no valid reason to expect a mass massacre a couple of hours later. None of us would have expected 30 more to be killed by the same gunman. We expect our terrorists to be foreigners dressed in turbans. Cho was a foreigner, an Asian, but had lived in the United States since he was 8 years old.. He was one of us, a quiet and odd bespectacled college student, but certainly not a terrorist or a danger to anyone. And that is where the true terror comes from- the fact that we don't know who could be a terrorist and a madman. We could be sitting in a fast food place right here in Clarke County one day or shopping at a local Wal-Mart and a deranged person could walk in the door- one who looks like the rest of us- and blow us away. It has happened in other places. The killings have also brought to the forefront the issue of gun control. Cho purchased one of two weapons used Monday, a Glock 9mm pistol, from a Roanoke, Va. gun dealer just last month. He was legally entitled to buy the gun and the dealer broke no laws in selling it to him. I think we need greater restrictions on some of our gun sales, especially regarding the kind of weapons that can be bought, but I don't think that outlawing guns will put an end to the kind of thing that happened Monday. If Cho had not bought a gun legally he would have found one through illegal means. People of faith have long debated the age-old question of why bad things happen to good people. Unfortunately, there has never been a good answer to the question. I thought of that paradoxical question Tuesday as I listened to the grief being expressed for the slain students and to the many questions about what happened and why. There will be great discussions and debates in the coming weeks and months about why something wasn't done about Cho and why Virginia Tech didn't take greater precautions to protect students. There will be debates on other campuses about how to better protect students so that similar incidents don't happen elsewhere. There will be arguments over gun control and how to handle the mentally deranged and many, many other issues. I hope that all of the talk will produce something good, something positive so that these students will not have died in vain. But I'm not going to think about all of that right now. Instead, I think I will remember to give my daughter an extra hug when she gets home from school today. If you have children or grandchildren- be they in kindergarten or college- I'd suggest you do the same.
And let's all say a prayer for the 32 students who were slain and their grieving families. Let's even say a prayer for the parents of Cho Seung-Hui. They may need our prayers most of all.
|
for larger version       |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
