How Do You Go On?

It'd been building up for days: my response to the Virginia Tech shooting. At first, I was terrified that my best friend, Amanda, had been hurt. I'd misread the location as Virginia Commonwealth the first time. But even when I found out that she was ok, I was somehow still not. There is something different about this than the high school shootings of several years ago. Calculated, yes. But for me, this whole incident struck closer to home than any tragedy has since 9/11. These weren't young high school kids, in cliques, passing notes and making fun of people in the lunch room. And these weren't people in an office building, going about their daily lives. These were college students. These were people like me, my sisters, my friends. I'm less than a year out of college, and the sense of "this could have happened to any one of us" is something I can't shake. I read the bios of the people who've been murdered, and there's some part of me that dies.

Whether we recognize it or not, everyone in college (or recently removed) has a sort of kinship. There isn't one of us that doesn't know what it's like to not get the classes we want, or to stay up all night studying, to go to a party where you don't know anyone, to get too drunk on the wrong night, or how great it feels when you realize for a moment where you are, just walking on campus and listening to your iPod, and knowing that this is just the start of everything else. It's this kinship that's drawn us all together. Some cynics out there (not me, not about this) might say that it's all superficial. How can all these campuses, so far away from VT, really give a flying shit about what happened? Because to all of us, it's too real. Thinking about what it would be like to be in your class, a place where you feel so safe you don't even think about it, and be shot.

It's just such a fucking waste. The whole thing is a huge, pointless waste. A 70-something Holocaust survivor was murdered while trying to save his students. It's unreal. Does anyone else just look at that sentence and want to stop being in the world for awhile? These kids are just like me and every other college kid, and these professors are just like professors on hundreds of campuses all over the US. It's not that they weren't special and unique people; they were. But because of the nature of college, we all know someone that was killed. We all know the professor that treated all his students like his own kids. We all know someone with a really cute myspace name. Every college student knows another student who is in the band, or who loves to dance, who has a few kids, who is just starting out, who is fluent in a language or two, or who would, given the right circumstances, sacrifice themselves for their fellow students, regardless of whether or not they knew them.

If there is blame to be placed, and I'm sure there is, I won't be placing it. Neither should anyone outside the world of Virginia Tech. Regardless of who didn't see the signs of a severely enraged young man coming close to causing disaster (this kid was so severely fucked up that nothing short of removing him from society would have stopped him), or who didn't suspend classes when there was a double homicide in a dorm (how often does any college campus deal with murder?), none of us is qualified right now to place blame on anyone. No one should be talking about this incident in those kind of abstract terms until the people at VT are ready to.

The one thing that everyone should talk about, in good time, is gun laws. Should someone's mental health history be taken into account when purchasing a gun? Should Virginia have more stringent gun laws? These are questions that should (and hopefully will) be asked in due time. And while I'll have an opinion, I doubt I'll really voice it. Nothing, absolutely nothing, can ever erase this. This kind of hurt, it's a violation of something that every college student in the US holds dear: safety. We take it for granted, sitting in our classrooms and dorms. This has opened our eyes to something scary: the weird kid. Is he just strange, or a time bomb? Do we talk to him, or do we risk making ourselves a target? Every college student in the country will now not only think about how to make themselves safe from outsiders, but how to make themselves safe from each other.

While parents and professors will struggle to move on and answer their own questions, students everywhere have a deeper, more comprehensive healing process to go through. As everyone tries to move on, this incident will become nothing more than rhetoric; let's try to prevent that from happening. Not just for our sake, but for the sake of 33 families who will be living their lives without a part of themselves. And for the sake of the 15,000 Virginia Tech students, faculty, and staff members, for whom that day and that experience will never be rhetoric.