“That kind of stuff doesn’t happen here.”
It’s amazing how much of our ability to sleep at night is based on a lie.
“I’ll just leave the kids home for a few minutes and run to the store.”
“I don’t really need to lock my door at night.”
The horror of the massacre at Virginia Tech is just the latest proof of how thin our security blanket really is, how easily the bubble can burst on our cozy little lives.
How desperately we cling to the notion that we have some control in the big picture. That’s why our first response is always to look for the flaw that lets the nightmare happen, because that provides the reason why, the way to fix things for next time.
“Why did security wait to start issuing e-mails?”
“Why did the English professor not do more with the dark brooding student constantly writing about death?”
We weren’t so concerned about early warning weather systems before the Albion tornado.
We paid scant attention to emergency managers’ warnings about communication systems before September 11th.
And we will react to Virginia Tech as well, as you will soon hear calls for campus-wide text and cell phone alert systems to warn students en masse quickly and cheaply.
All of it will help reduce the damage when the unthinkable becomes reality.
None of it will prevent the next time from happening.
Parents lost children, sisters lost brothers, boyfriends lost girlfriends, but who knows how much we have all lost as those 30 bright lights went dark.
What breakthrough in technology or engineering will we not have as a result?
How many have had what should be the best four years of their lives shattered forever, heady stories of learning life on one’s own turned to talk of memorials and what could have been?
The Virginia Tech family is dealing with a reality that has no easy answers, a place that makes no sense and never will.
An even scarier reality is that, no matter how we plan, it just as easily could have been your family.
Or mine.
HEY! If you wish to comment please email me at scott.bremner@wsee.tv. Write “Comments” in the subject line so I don’t miss it. If you wish to add your thoughts to a website for the victims of the Virginia Tech massacre, write to http://rosa.hosting.vt.edu/index.php/memorial/
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