I cannot believe the the sorrow the community of students, faculty, family and friends must feel in this time. My friend Timothy Dees wrote a reflection on the “atrocity” see below… Our prayers, songs, psalms, and hearts lift up the families and hurting of VT.
VIRGINIA TECH
I spent this morning gauging the world’s reaction to the Virginia Tech shootings. Different newspapers seemed to highlight different lessons learned from this incident, as if it were a fable, in desperate need of some moral. The New York Times ran an op-ed piece from a professor in Blacksburg that called for togetherness. The Times (UK) emphasized the nationality of the shooter, trying to tease out some narrative of the stranger in a strange land. Le Monde, unwilling to spare any opportunity for trans-Atlantic finger-wagging, berated America’s “fétichisme des armes”. Die Zeit, a major German paper, ran the article under the headline “Späte Warnung”-late warning-focusing on the administration’s decision not to close the school earlier.
Maybe this is indeed a parable about gun control, or the proximity of disaster, or the irresponsibility of the university’s administration, or the role of immigrants in America, but I doubt it.
Papers the world over have been calling this a tragedy, and in many ways it is. But a tragedy, in its Shakespearean sense, is distinguished not just by its calamitous end, but also by its proximity to felicity. Romeo and Juliet wasn’t a tragedy just because they both died at the end, it was a tragedy because they came so close to being together. But there was no chance for the students at Virginia Tech. From the moment the young man pulled the gun, there was no hope for a good outcome.
But if it’s not a tragedy, and it’s not a parable, what is it? The answer is terrifying: it is an atrocity. No one likes atrocities, because they force us to stare down man’s inhumanity to man. We prefer to act like this was a force of nature, impersonal, like a tornado or hurricane, but this was a man with evil in his heart, and plans for mass murder. If the story is anything but that, we haven’t confronted the enormity of this massacre.
Timothy Dees
I think the songs recently recorded by Matthew Perryman Jones on his new album Throwing Punches in the Dark called ” Hard Times ” Seems appropriate for such a day as this….