Monday’s tragedy at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg brings into stark focus one of the most tragic American, if not human, flaws:
Finger-pointing.
If it were my child, my grief and my anger would overflow the horizons. To have one’s child taken away in such a senseless, useless way is the stuff of real tragedy. I would be inconsolable. I would be unreasonable.
The oldest Little Editor is one year away from college. It keeps me up at night. Literally.
The anti-gun people have obviously gotten their two cents in. Even the pro-gun lobby has mentioned that if a student were legally armed that perhaps the situation may have been averted.
Oh my goodness. If Charlton Heston shows up in Blacksburg, I don’t know what I’ll do.
The thing is, the people pointing the fingers are not, for the most part, stakeholders in the event:
Why did University officials do this? Why didn’t they do that? Reporters even remarked that the Virginia Tech police chief was too dispassionate.
The White House press corps jumped on the bandwagon by making the President’s gun policy the issue.
According the the BBC, Virginia Govenor Tim Kaine has already pledged to launch an independent committee to review Monday’s events.
If anyone saw the words “parents” or “family” in those articles, shoot me an email, would you? Other than students, faculty, and staff on the campus, it strikes me that those are the only people who have the right at this juncture to start playing the blame game.
But if the rest of us must cast blame before the grieving is even done, if the grieving can every really, truly end, then let us cast it where it belongs.
Let’s blame the crazy [edited] who did it.
Are we so shallow a people that if the perpetrator is dead we demand vengeance upon the living?
Pull that damn finger in before I bite it off.
If you’re anything like me, you remember 9/11 like it was yesterday.
That was a bad day. I have an uncle and several cousins who used to work in the World Trade Center.
I had an uncle who used to work in Washington, D.C. Not in the Pentagon, thank Heaven, but it took awhile to find out what had happened there.
My sister works in downtown Pittsburgh. There was a panic there, as everyone there initially thought the flight that crashed in Pennsylvania was headed for the USX building. It took about a day to get news.
I distinctly remember the President standing on a heap of rubble where the World Trade Center used to be telling the nation in so many words that we were going to get the scum that had knocked the buildings down.
It was exactly what we needed to hear. We just needed to know who they were.
I don’t remember him saying anything about reviewing the national security infrastructure or dropping the axe on the person or people who had screwed up the intelligence reports. That came later. And it needed to come. It did not need to happen right at that moment.
Virginia Tech is a little different. We know who it was. He is no longer a threat.
Now is the time to grieve. It is up to the rest of us to help those who have been devastated by monumental loss by giving them space to grieve. We can help by refusing to give credence to those who would point the finger for political gain. Let us make it unfashionable to finger-point, like burning flags is unfashionable.
If mistakes were made, if there is blame to be cast, it will come out in the fullness of time. We know that experts will examine these tragic events and attempt to devise means by which they will never be repeated.
As we resist the urge to judge, let us keep in mind that a university is a place that, in theory, caters to adults, and most places that serve adults do not keep a homicidal maniac playbook for easy reference. A university has no campus-wide public address system; no means of mass-communication except for email.
How do you warn 28,000 people that there’s a psychopath armed to the teeth on the loose? Especially a population that is not glued to a television set at every moment?
Lock down? I can lock down my fifth graders. They have to do what I say. It’s the law. Adults? Who can say if it would have helped.
I’m not making light of the situation, but consider this: if a gunman were loose in a twelve-screen movie theatre, would you know? And if the sixteen year-old usher told you to remain in the theatre, would you stay or run for the treeline?
There are just too many unknowns and too few facts for us to start looking for someone to blame. A thoughtful person should be too proud or too ashamed to follow the lead of those who grandstand off of the misery of others by finger-pointing.