There aren’t actually words for what happened Monday morning in Virginia, and God knows a lot of people have been looking for them. I’ve heard things like “tragic” and “devastating” thrown around, describing the “mass shooting,” the “massacre.” They all ring just a little bit hollow.
I grew up in Virginia. A big chunk of every graduating class at my high school goes on to Virginia Tech and my two childhood best friends are roommates there. You can tell me all you want that what happened was a “devastating blow to our society” and a “tragic massacre,” but you’ll have to forgive me-somehow, it feels wrong to phrase the events and emotions of Monday, the fear for the lives of people I’ve known for as long as I can remember, in the same terms I used to discuss the end of “King Lear” last week in my Shakespeare class.
Maybe that’s unfair. There are similar themes: lives lost senselessly, shock and betrayal, a community torn apart. What happened in Blacksburg was a modern tragedy unprecedented in this country; maybe the language of the sensational, the language of epic heartbreak and ruined innocence.maybe those are the right terms.
Maybe, but I’m not convinced. Watching the news yesterday, someone a lot smarter than me said, “It’s sad that things can’t just happen anymore.”
At first the idea angered me-things shouldn’t just happen! There damn well should be recognition for lives lost, should be an attempt to understand what transpired. We may never make sense of the deaths of those students and faculty, but that is absolutely not an excuse not to try.
Or is it? I was thinking about it this morning, still shaken despite knowing that all of my own friends and acquaintances survived, and it struck me: understanding isn’t the point.
When we look at Columbine and now when we look at Virginia Tech, as a society we try to understand what went wrong and how we can fix it. We condemn the alienation, we condemn the social prejudices, but for all that condemnation we’re frequently left a step backwards from where we began. The senselessness frustrates, the pain scabs over with anger and instead of being left comforted we are left furious, vengeful. We blame society without including ourselves in it; we lash out at those who would seek to recriminate us for behaviors few ever undertook with malice.
The conclusion frequently reached is that WE are not the ones to blame: to blame are those who create and perpetuate the conflicts; to blame is everyone else.
So, instead of healing old wounds, we inadvertently create new ones. We mourn and then, rather than solving the underlying problems, we stigmatize those seen as part of the “problematic” groups. Pain breeds fear and fear breeds hate and what sparked our tears in the first place becomes simply another battle in the war that is made of society.
It shouldn’t be about that. Blacksburg shouldn’t be about that and Columbine shouldn’t be about that. There shouldn’t be a rhetorical dichotomy erected from the debris of a tragedy to explain it to us, to give society someone to blame.
There are, frankly, too many people to blame for that to ever be a useful undertaking-the gunman, the man who sold him the gun, the parents who let him “turn out” as a killer, the administrators who chose not to cancel classes..Something as horrific as the shootings Monday morning should not be remembered for the failures of some to prevent it; it should be remembered for its victims and for its senselessness. Cauterizing our wounds, the wounds of an American society shocked and shaken by the knowledge that something like Blacksburg can happen, should not be the goal. We, society, are not the point. The point is the lives that were taken and the lives that have been affected. The point is the friends we lost and stood to lose.
Speaking of Monday as “the Virginia Tech Massacre” allows us to detach from it. Harping on the causes of the event and discussing it in the language and paradigm of the epic threatens to make it, for those of us not directly impacted, just another news story, just another shooting, just another social tragedy. That shouldn’t be the point. There are no words; looking for them does more harm than good. There are emotions: love, fear, hope and loss..There’s prayer for those hurting. Let that be the point.
Sara is a sophomore in Arts & Sciences. She can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].