In Memorium: 4-16-07

It seems a little repugnant to be consumed with worry and fretfulness over the quarterly performance of some public company, when 33 families are mourning the loss of loved ones on the campus of Virginia Tech University.

By now you know yesterday’s horrific story of a 19-year old Asian male who shot and killed two students in a dorm room, and then two hours later opened fire inside an engineering classroom building, slaughtering another 30 students and teachers before turning his weapon on himself. All before lunchtime.

The hardest question in the world to answer is, “why?” The next-hardest question is, “what if?” which is the miserable torture shared by all survivors, university officials and law enforcement.

Believing the initial double-homicide to be an isolated incident, university officials warned students only with an e-mail, which proved to be a miscalculation on a colossal, tragic scale.

The freedoms in our lives have already be constricted by the nefarious escapades of fanatics who fly airplanes into building, deranged patriots who detonate rented trucks in front of government offices, and sadly, mis-guided youth who have lost all their moral moorings, and believe their torture can only be relieved by going out in blazing gore, taking shots from clock towers and inside school libraries, cafeterias and classrooms.

As a result, we must submit ourselves to dehumanizing scrutiny while boarding aircraft, pack our children’s things into transparent back packs, and look over our shoulders each time we enter a government building. How ironic that in order to access the fruits of liberty and justice we must run a gauntlet of lock-down security and x-ray scanners.

I don’t know what the answer is any more than you do.

Perhaps today is not the day for seeking those answers, but instead a day in which flags should be flown at half mast in honor of 32 victims, and the horrible memory of one deranged madman, and prayers offered on behalf of their families…who will never truly find closure to the why’s and what-if’s that gnaw at us all.