Last Monday, a very lonely, severely mentally disturbed man opened fire in a Virginia Tech classroom, ending the lives of 32 bright and promising students. Immediately, news crews from around the country descended on Blacksburg. President Bush along with his wife came shortly after to pay their respects. House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, called for a moment of silence.
I watched in horror and grieved for the parents of those young men and women whose lives ended that day. The next day, as our nation was still trying to make sense of the Virginia tragedy, now prominently labeled the worst mass murder in our history, more than 170 people died in Iraq.
What happened in Virginia last Monday happens in Iraq every day. Let’s imagine the unimaginable now: A mass shooting like the one in Virginia, happening here on our soil every day. This tragedy in Blacksburg really brought it home.
On the daily basis we hear of young American and Iraqi lives ending in Baghdad. Granted, it is a very different conflict but the cost is ultimately the same—someone’s dreams, hopes, ambitions, disappearing with a shot, a bomb, an accident. Yet we, Americans, are becoming more and more desensitized to murder. One difference however is that the House Speaker isn’t observing minutes of silence, and our President isn’t attending funerals for the young American soldiers who lost their lives fighting this senseless war.
So what we do is analyze, research, try to get into the minds of the killers, in other words, we try to make sense of the tragedy. When we can’t make sense of the tragedy, we resort to partisan politics, backstabbing, and infinite punditry. In the midst of all the infighting within our government, more and more lives are being lost on the daily basis.
Maybe this would be a good time to stop and think about how inconceivable, unfair, and utterly tragic it is to have someone’s life vanish before our eyes. And it doesn’t ultimately matter whether that life was in Blacksburg Virginia, Baghdad, Darfur, East Timor, Israel, or anywhere else.
