The irrelevant
I spent the afternoon doing the impossible, traveling through time and space. Here in Detroit, and there in Blacksburg. Then back in time, back to grad school.
I drove to campus that morning, listening to the radio. Willie Nelson got interrupted.
“. . . a shooting on campus. One professor has been shot, we aren’t sure about others. . . male, about six-three, two-twenty. Armed and dangerous, last seen driving a. . .”
I knew immediately who the shooter was.
DC, a student in the discussion section I led as a grad student teach assistant. He’d come to my office a couple of weeks earlier to discuss his test grade. He’d disagreed on every point, yelling louder and louder. Finally he pounded the wall in my tiny office, looming forward into my face.
“I’d question God himself if I thought I was right.” He left, and now there was a hole in my office wall. He was the only student who ever frightened me. I made a mental note never to meet him again in the evening.
The next day I ran into DC’s advisor, the teacher for the only other class DC was taking: entomology. He told me that DC was the best natural student of entomology he’d ever had. DC started college as a pre-med. When he left school to save up some money to pay for another semester, he was drafted. DC had returned from Vietnam with a great interest in bugs “He’s just brilliant,” Prof. R. said. “He’s a little shaky since he’s come back, but except for thinking that people are trying to keep him away from what he wants to do, he’s just fine.”
I had trouble believing the DC he spoke of was the same person who scared me so badly.
As Willie finished his song, flashing lights appeared in my rear-view mirror. I stopped. “Miss. . . there’s been a shooting, and you might be in danger. Please come with me, we need to get you away from here.“
I was right. DC had purchased a weapon that morning. He came straight to campus, and walked through the building into his adviser’s office. Five minutes later, DC was gone and the entomology prof was dead.
Two years later, I was out of grad school. I had a very quiet, thin boy in my class, Prof. R’s son. Too quiet for a 9 or 10 year old. Just once, he brought me a lovely luna moth. “Please, Ms. Kidspeak, can we keep it here? I can’t take it home, my mom won’t let me."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The dissonance
Some 32 or more young people are dead in Blacksburg Virginia.
Briefly today, I worked at home and did laundry. The dryer buzzed, and I unloaded it, turning on the only TV in our house that actually functions. People were talking excitedly about the shootings at VT:
“They are so young.
They are just innocent, they know nothing of life.
I’m a mother, I expect them to be safe at college.
The college didn’t protect them! We pay for the colleges to take care of our children.
They’re just teenagers! We expect kids that age to be safe.
They have to have a way to warn our children when they are in danger.”
Last night, I was also in the basement doing laundry. Watching a few minutes of a PBS documentary on the war, I heard a middle aged officer saying it was the younger men who were most likely to be injured, to die. They didn’t know how to protect themselves as the older soldiers did. The young ones don’t know how to avoid the danger.
So on the one hand, we send some children away, on the brink of being adults, away to fight in a terrible war. But most children of that age are sent away to a much safer place – to college or university. The dissonance between the two destinations, one where life is held to be safe and protected and the other where life is known to be at risk, is jarring, especially when similar young and vulnerable persons are sent both places.
Without doubt every family that has lost a son or daughter at Virginia Tech is suffering terribly, and that suffering will continue, not fade away, though they may learn to live with it. There will be headlines for days, weeks, and the campus will forever be marked by the tragedy. Many here will understand their suffering, and wonder at the randomness of it. No one who hears of the death will think that their child deserved to die. No one will think their child died for a good reason.
Without doubt, every family that has lost a son or a daughter in Iraq is suffering terribly, and that suffering will continue as well, not fading away. Perhaps the family will learn to live with it, in time. Though there may be a counting (3308 by 15 April 2007), there will not be special headlines for those sons or daughters. The President will not visit. However, few will think their deaths random. Some will think those children died for a noble cause, but a growing number will think that their child died in vain.
~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~
Violations Seen and Unseen
There was another place of death. A young Asian scholar was in competition with his fellow countryman. Both had come to this country, both were outstanding students, but only one got the top prize in the university. This had consequences: A job, here. Honor, in the home country. Judged only slightly less stellar, the loser felt much worse.
He talked with the Dean who was the unofficial advisor to all of the Asian students on campus. She had been born in Asian, the daughter of missionaries, and she offered her home and hospitality, and cultural familiarity to so many Asian students.
However, his feeling grew worse. And one day, he got up, bought a gun, and went to his academic department. He interrupted a seminar, killed his professor, and his rival, and others in the room. Crossing the campus, he went to the Dean’s office. No one knows what he said to her, but he shot and killed her, and then killed himself.
It was very bad, though not on the scale of the Blackburg tragedy.
When the campus opened again, I met my class at 8:30am, in the same building where the professors had been shot. I didn’t know what to say. It was obvious that my students were nervous – it was a large and talkative group in most circumstances but that day they were silent. I decided that I had to mention the shooting, so I said that we had had a terrible thing happen in our community, and I was upset, as I thought they probably were. I could not deliver a lecture on children’s psychological problems without acknowledging that we were upset. Finally, I said if anyone wanted to say something about the shooting, or their reaction, now was the time.
A young Asian man stood up. “We are afraid”, he said. “We are worried that we, the Asian students, will be blamed for this, especially Dean B’s death.”
“Yes,” said a young woman, another Asian student. “I’m afraid we will be blamed, that people will hate us.”
“She was like . . . our mother here,” a third Asian student added. “I don’t know what we will do without her.”
The students began to stand up in twos and threes, talking directly to the Asian students, and to each other. I sat down, except for passing around the box of Kleenex that someone produced. One student walked out, after saying that he thought the Asian students should go home and get education in their own countries. Another student asked him to leave the class, and he did.
I thought of those students, especially those Asian students today. There is another family in Virginia, mourning now, and not many will be comforting them. I hope that other Asian students at Blacksburg, particularly the Korean students, are not harassed for this.
~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~
I don’t know why the young man at Blacksburg killed his fellow students. That kind of violence, in a peaceful place, permits no understanding.
What I know about DC, the brilliant young scholar who shot his advisor at my school some 30 years ago, is this: As a very young man, he went off to Vietnam. He came back, whole in body, but not in mind. He was changed forever - suspicious, wary, angry, unable to rest, unable to trust. No one understood how much he was changed. His future was lost somewhere during that war, and from that loss, many more were hurt, forever.
And again, we are sending more young people away to war. That seems far from Blacksburg, but not to me. Some will come back whole, some will come back in part, some will not come back at all. Others will look whole, but will not be. They will be here, but gone.
__________________________
