The Latest in a String

If, somehow, you remain unaware of the shooting at Virginia Tech on Monday, you should check a news site. Any news site – they’ve all got plenty of the latest information up. Who was killed, how many. A timeline of events, a list of complaints from the parents to the police, a section for mourning, a section for witnesses to describe the events.

I write this from Lakewood, Colorado – only a few minutes away from Columbine High School. Columbine wasn’t the first school shooting, but I believe that for many of our generation, it was the most memorable. Almost eight years ago exactly, I walked into my friend’s home after school to see frantic news coverage flashing across the screen, his mother with her hand over her heart, saying, “Oh my Lord, oh my Lord,” just as a bleeding student heaved himself from a window to safety. He left a streak of blood on the wall.

The shock was immense, then. Eight years and many school tragedies later, the display of shock on the news has something of a practiced feel to it. Alessandra Stanley writes in today’s New York Times: “The amazing thing is how familiar campus shootings have become. For viewers, initial disbelief is quickly folded into a methodical ritual of breaking bad news. News trucks race to the scene, witnesses upload images recorded on cellphones and video cameras, students on the scene calmly and patiently recount their impressions in front of news cameras.” We all wait; we all watch to see the tragedy unfold.

I don’t understand the fascination we all feel with such unimaginable tragedies. In the next few days, biographies of the deceased will begin to fill the pages of the news – they have, in fact, already started. And I read them compulsively, unable to control a sharp eye for irony, the tragic twist for each of them. Take, for example, Liviu Librescu, 75 years old, a senior researcher and lecturer who had survived the German Holocaust, only to be killed some sixty years later in an American holocaust.

Once the victims have been bled onto every news page, the climax will arrive: a comprehensive biography of the killer, an analysis of his behavior, a “reason why,” as though there could ever be a reason for such an atrocity. He was angry, or he was hurt, or he was crazy – probably all of these. His mother won’t know why he did it; his friends will say he was a considerate man, going through a period of turmoil in his life. And thirty-three people, including the man himself, will still be sleeping under a blanket of earth.

I extend my heart and my prayers to any affected by this event. And tomorrow I will flip through the headlines, reading the prayers and speeches of others, looking for something, anything, that might indicate why people keep getting the idea to wreak so much havoc within institutions of hope and progress, erasing so many unwritten futures.