Tragedy on a University Campus

Thursday April 19, 2007

I was taken by this commentary of retired Episcopal bishop, John Shelby Spong. I am posting this excerpt for your own reflections. It also occurred to me that in the light of the deteriorating conditions in Iraq, we do indeed need to accept the reality of a surreal insecurity.

I should like to add that I am outraged by the decision of NBC TV to broadcast photos, images and messages of the murderer. And I am not impressed by the manipulative excuses by other networks to do the same. No matter how some ‘experts’ have justified these images, they have virtually made a hero of a mass murderer. With the exception of Charles Gibson on ABC Nightly News, the media have blown it big time!

And what of the daily massacres taking place daily in Iraq in a war the justification for which changes day by day!

And here is an insightful commentary from Bishop Spong:

The horror of the massacre that engulfed the Tech campus this past week would have been difficult to embrace intellectually or emotionally, no matter where it occurred. It was made doubly difficult for me because of my long history with that institution. I joined a nation of citizens in shock and grief as we struggled to comprehend the incomprehensible.
America’s way of processing tragedy is to talk it to pieces through the media. Every network pre-empted all other programming to focus on the massacre. Maps of the Tech campus were shown; students willing to talk to the media were plentiful, their words sometimes filled with the campus jargon of those very familiar with the names of all the buildings, even using nicknames that only fellow students would understand. Trauma experts, psychiatrists and other would-be specialists offered their wisdom, even in the face of an almost total lack of factual data, about the causes, the motivation, the signs that were missed, and the breakdown in security. Politicians from the President to Virginia’s two Senators became “secular high priests” seeking to express outrage and grief simultaneously and thereby to offer comfort, faith and hope that might assure parents, grandparents and friends that their grief was shared by the people of the nation and the people of Virginia. Tim Kaine, the Governor of the Old Dominion, as Virginia is called, was on a trade mission in the Far East and was not available, but the news that he was flying home immediately communicated his identification with the tragedy and illustrated the gravity of the situation. When the media people had done all that they could do, the grief in some fifty families in America was still palpable, the pain and loss still intense, and through the process of identification with those families, the anxiety of people in this nation was raised to somewhere between orange and red. This trauma had all of the intensity of a domestic 9/11.

Blame is one of the tactics we human beings employ in the face of irrational and inexplicable events. If a disaster can be seen to be someone’s fault, it appears to satisfy something within us. So there was much early talk about a breakdown in security. The two attacks were separated by two hours and yet security was not tightened, classes were not cancelled, and students were not warned until the second and far bloodier attack was carried out. The fickle finger of fate began its probe for targets to blame with early nominees being campus security, the administration and even the University President, who responded typically by immediately ordering a full scale investigation. There had been strange warning signs that in retrospect appear to have been minimized, like bomb threats on the campus during the last thirty days, which served as another indication that the tragedy could have been averted had the authorities been more aggressive. Hindsight, however, always possesses 20-20 vision. Tragedies also tend to produce both heroes and scapegoats. One recalls Rudy Giuliani, the mayor of New York whose political career was in shambles before 9/11, identified as it was with scandals, a messy public divorce, minority alienation over alleged and real police brutality and his own personal health issues; yet he emerged as the hero with a strong public performance in that national disaster, which not only made him TIME magazine’s “Man of the Year” but also turned him into a viable presidential candidate. Finding the scapegoat was harder in 9/11, but one candidate was clearly the Bush Administration which struggled to keep a full investigation from being carried out, and also put strange twists on the data that were available, like a memo marked “highly confidential” in August 2001 that warned of an imminent terrorist attack, but which did not alarm then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice sufficiently to disturb the President on vacation at his Crawford Texas ranch. Eventually the head of the CIA, George Tenet, was fired, but the announcement made suggested that he had resigned “to spend more time with his family,” and then he was later rehabilitated by being presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in a White House ceremony. It is always best to cover mistakes with outsized efforts of praise.

Heroes, however, will emerge. They always do and I doubt if the campus security force has sufficient status to be an effective scapegoat. That would be like blaming the abuse of Abu Ghraib on Private Lynndie English. Tragedies also bring the usual issues back into attention in the political arena. America’s violence is consistently blamed on the proliferation of guns, and that charge is regularly countered by spokespersons for the National Rifle Association and other gun lobby organizations that rehearse the time-worn cliché that “guns do not kill people, people do.” Clergy seek to use every tragedy to reinforce their doctrine of human sin and depravity and to call for a return to the values of yesterday and even to the God of yesterday, while other moralizers offer their analysis of human nature and make their pitch for a new moral awakening.

Most people will not be moved by any of these special interests. This bizarre scene at Virginia Tech will simply sit uneasily on the body politic until it has been absorbed into our individual psyches where it becomes one more ingredient in the rising tide of angst, anxiety and fear that seems endemic in modern society. It will find expression politically in various attempts to create security in a free society, which will normally take the form of locking the door after the horse has escaped and is usually accomplished by diminishing our freedoms. Ultimately the public will learn enough about the perpetrator of this heinous crime, not to exact revenge for he has already turned his lethal weapon on himself, but to be able to reconstruct the steps he took before his madness erupted into brutality. That strangely enough brings some comfort because we can understand mental illness and can at least console ourselves that none of us or any of our friends are like that. We will, however, never be able to escape the fact that some human beings are psychotic and they lurk in the shadows of our society, out of which they can strike at anytime and claim us or someone we love as their victims. That realization will never fully go away.

Security is a great fantasy among fear-laden human beings. We seek it in many forms. It is seen in tribal identity, in religion, in our constant need to identify and reject enemies or those who are different and who thus threaten our imposed, security building codes of normalcy. We even seek it in various escape modes from alcohol to drugs to promiscuity. Security, however, is always elusive. It is a human desire, but never a human achievement. The most powerful nation in the world could not protect itself on 9/11 from 19 terrorists armed only with box cutters. The well trained Israeli army cannot protect the citizens of Israel from suicide bombers. The armed forces of the United States and the United Kingdom together cannot contain the violence of militant Iraqis. The police forces of our various cities cannot prevent murders, robberies, rape and child molesting. Security is always an illusion, but seeking it is the nature of humanity itself, because we are self-conscious creatures who live in the medium of time. We know that we are mortal and destined to die. Nothing we do can change that. God will not stop it. Prayer will not make us safe. Good deeds designed to win the approval of the heavenly parent will not guarantee that we live another day if someone marks us for death, or even if we find ourselves accidentally in the wrong place at the wrong time. That is the nature of our humanity. Perhaps the time has come to stop pretending that it is otherwise and to embrace the brisk winds of anxiety that mark human existence and to learn to live courageously and creatively in the face of constant insecurity.

I believe that is what faith ultimately means. Faith has little to do with proper believing or with the ability to say yes to creedal and doctrinal assertions. It will not be found in saluting pitiable claims that some leader is infallible or that some sacred text is inerrant. Faith ultimately has something to do with being, with embracing the unknown, with a willingness to step into the future and with the ability to live each day with integrity, even in the face of the anxiety of humanity which we never escape. Both human insecurity and our ability to live with it become our glory when we have the courage to be all that we are capable of being in the face of it.
By faith, the Epistle to the Hebrews tells us, Abraham left the security of his known home in Ur of the Chaldees. He journeyed into the wilderness and into an unknown future, but in that process he discovered his destiny and his purpose.

If the Virginia Tech tragedy and the 9/11 tragedy can create in us similar faith that enables us to leave the known for the unknown, the secure for the insecure and thereby to embrace more of what it means to be human, this tragedy can perhaps become an occasion for growth.

John Shelby Spong
A New Christianity For A New World

And this just in from a colleague. You may not agree but I think there’s more than a grain of truth and wisdom in his point of view.

A brutal truth: Massacre is just part of everyday life in America

You hear no new arguments because, deep down, there is nothing new to be said.

by Rupert Cornwell, 18 April 2007

It is as if we are on autopilot. The ghastly tragedy swamps the news to the exclusion of all else. There are the heartbreaking stories of a university shattered and of the dozens of victims, their mostly young lives cut short so senselessly. We listen to the grief-stricken remarks of the President, and follow the breathless investigation of the perpetrator’s background, his history of mental illness.

We share the anguished second guessing about whether his murderous rampage could have been prevented. Yet everything is playing to a script we know by heart. Virginia Tech, of course, is the worst incident of its kind in US history — and at one level, you would gain the impression from American television that Cho Seung-Hui has literally stopped the world.

He hasn’t of course. On Tuesday, in what passes for a relatively quiet news day in Iraq, wire services reported the deaths of 56 people in violence across the country: some of them gunned down, some killed by a suicide bomber, some discovered as decomposed or decapitated corpses. But we heard not a word of that, nor of the trial in absentia in Italy of a US soldier accused of shooting dead an Italian intelligence agent, nor of the report that North Korea may be about to shut down a key nuclear reactor (which would be very big news indeed if true.) And somebody shot dead the Mayor of Nagasaki.

But who cares? Instead, nothing but Virginia Tech.
Yet, however exceptional the event, there is something formulaic, even routine, about the coverage. There is no soul searching, no wondering what might be wrong with a society where such things happen so frequently. You hear no new arguments, for deep down there is nothing new to be said.
No detail of the tragedy is too tiny to recount; from where Cho went to high school to the thoughts of the postman who delivered mail, to where the family lived in the Virginia suburb of Centreville (and never met him). Yet America is showing scant sign of addressing the far bigger issue — of whether it is finally time to get serious about gun control.

“Today is the time to focus on the families, the school and the community,” Dana Perino, the White House spokeswoman, said. But, she added, “we must allow the facts of the case to unfold before we talk about policy.” Reasonable enough. But if not now, in the white heat of stunned national outrage, when?

For public anger can force unexpected change. Over the course of a long career as a loud-mouthed talk radio host, Don Imus must have made hundreds of offensive remarks. Last week, he made what seemed just another one, about the Rutgers University women’s basketball team. Astonishingly, public tolerance at last snapped. In three days, Imus was out on his ear.

Might not Virginia Tech be the Rutgers University joke for the gun lobby, the moment when violence-drenched America says enough is enough? Alas no. Yes, there will be debate, just as after similar awful incidents in recent years, from Columbine High School to the murder of the five Amish schoolgirls last October in Pennsylvania.

But the underlying mood is of disillusioned resignation. So President Bush formulaically speaks of a “day of sadness for our entire nation,” and how Americans are “asking God to provide comfort for all who have been affected.” It is less certain, however, that a President from gun-toting Texas, who has pursued the conservative vote his entire career, will try to mobilize temporal political forces to render comfort from the Almighty unnecessary.

Keep coming to our world-class universities, was the message to foreign students from Sean McCormack, the State Department spokesman yesterday. Virginia Tech was “an aberration”. As Donald Rumsfeld infamously remarked of the anarchy of post-invasion Iraq, “Stuff happens”.

School shootings happen year in, year out, like tornados in the Midwest in springtime and hurricanes in the south in summer. There will be pressure to step up security procedures on campuses. But that, I confidently predict, will be it. Some even urge more guns, not less. The shooting was proof that “gun bans are the problem, and that Americans should have the rights to defend themselves”, according to The Gun Owners of America, a firearms lobbying group. In the meantime, the mighty media river rolls on, washing everything else away. And copycats watch, and wait to choose their moment.

The massacre at Virginia Tech is alarming, not just because of its scale, or that the authorities missed warning signs about Cho Seung-Hui, or that he found it so easy to carry out his terrible mission. The biggest worry is the “copy cat” risk — or rather virtual certainty — that some other student who’s feeling depressed or victimised and wondering if life’s worth while, will see what happened at Blackburg. And then he’ll decide that he too might as well go out with a bang (or more exactly, as many deadly bangs as possible).

The question is not whether, but where, when and how a new outrage will happen. Not, thankfully, at St Edward’s University in Austin, Texas, or at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, nor at the University of Oklahoma. The first two received bomb threats yesterday and briefly evacuated their campus. At the third, someone was reportedly seen with a weapon. All three scares were unfounded. But sooner or later, the scare will be real, and more people will die because of America’s inability to strip the glamour from guns.

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