Empty Chairs at Empty Tables

Virginia Tech set a national record today. They are now the location of the nation's highest death toll for a shooting spree--33 at present, including the shooter, and 29 more in the hospital.

This pisses me off for a number of reasons. One, the feeling, always the feeling with these things, that it could have been avoided. If someone had just known. If the alarm had been raised earlier. If someone had concealed an illegal handgun in the dorm and shot the fucker dead at 7:15 in the morning. You know. All the usual what-ifs.

But that quickly segues into my anger with the co-opters of tragedy. The uninvolved drama queens who will milk this for all the excitement it's worth, despite not really being affected. The people who will claim that since their third grade neighbor's kid went to VT, they are personally hurt and distraught by this. The people who will co-op all the sympathy for themselves, who will make this not about a college community that has been broken in the most terrible of ways, but another reason to deserve attention.

And I think about the people who have faith, and I wonder how their faith is holding up. If prayer helps them. If asking people who don't believe to pray helps them. If prayer will help any of the families as anything other than a meditation for peace and clarity. I do believe in prayer, but only for the person doing it. I don't believe that people can effect any change for others solely by prayer.

Finally, I think about the obvious comparisons. I think about Columbine, and I think about where I was in 1999. And I realize that I'm a senior, which means that everyone in college now went through the post-Columbine metal detectors, the workshops on how not to bully, on violence, the stricter gun laws, and I realize that nothing, NOTHING, has done any fucking good. Because all we have learned to do is kill each other better. More. With handguns. Not a crime of passion, not "I just started shooting, and didn't want to stop." But premeditated, with plenty of ammo, and two hours to make it from the dorm to the engineering building.

I'm not a Virginian by law yet, and I'm not sure I'll ever be one in my heart. But today's a day when I wish we could all just get along. That we could say with simplicity that we feel their pain, that we are a college campus too, that our security is all the more fragile for the fact that theirs has been breeched. That everything will always be slightly different from here on out. Dorms will be designed differently. Administrators will be briefed. And everyone, no matter how ineffectual, will pray that it never happens again.