the blame game
when Columbine happened, it was Marilyn Manson. it seems any time an attack happened, even much prior to 9/11, we blamed middle eastern terrorist groups. they were the first to be blamed for the Oklahoma City bombing (which happened this week, twelve years ago).
now that the massacre has occurred at Virginia Tech, we have to blame people who didn't send the shooter into a rubber room because of the disturbing things he wrote.
we have to blame the president of the university who couldn't evacuate the entire school when two people were killed in the dorms.
we have to blame anyone we can get our hands on. I don't buy it.
I personally think that for every twenty disturbed people out there who might at one point have the potential to commit a horrendous crime such as this, there is only person that would actually put something like this into action. regardless of disturbing warning signs, these things happen more often than you might think. in even freshman composition papers, people might write strange, bizarre, sexist, racist things that are rarely taken as any sort of threats. trust me - I've read more freshman comp papers in my writing center career than any one person needs to.
even the macabre expressions of the Virginia Tech killer could not have served as an undeniable crystal ball. if someone had recommended him to therapy on campus, who's to say that he would have gone, or that he could have really been helped? who do you blame then for a failed therapy case - a social worker who has saved and helped so many others but was unable to reach someone who happened to be a killer?
the further we get into a situation like this, the further we try to look for blame, the more ridiculous things get.
I personally don't think that the school could have shut everything down after the shootings on campus. I was on campus on 9/11, a day in which it seemed as though the world could come crashing down at any moment. I was in a bassoon lesson while the first plane hit, and I stayed in a practice room for a full hour before I exited Colburn Hall, saw forum cancelled, heard people talking about security at Boston's airport, and finally walked into the bookstore and heard what happened. by about 1pm that day, the campus was rolling tumbleweeds, but many students stayed on campus because they had nowhere else to go.
the truth about a campus like Virginia Tech is that it was not like Columbine High School. I've been to the VT campus - we went there on a pep band trip my sophomore year. beautiful campus, and hugely spread out. you didn't just have people moving in one place at one time, all going to do the same thing at once. you probably had kids who lived on nearby floors of the dorms where the first few students were killed. they might not have heard about it until many hours later. I don't see how an entire college campus, as I heard today, that is about the size of the City of Winter Park can be completely shut in two hours. it's just not a logistical possibility.
and as a result, something else strange happened when I was on campus at UCF before we knew the full scope and death count of what happened on Monday afternoon. I was in my piano class, about ready to take the harmonization part of my quiz, and we hear this intense siren. we're convinced at first it's a faraway fire truck, or something.
then a voice starts talking. in six long years as a music student at UCF, I've never heard anything like this. even a lights out/fire alarm during midterm juries in fall 2003. this voice on the alarm starts saying "ATTENTION! ATTENTION! AN EMERGENCY HAS BEEN REPORTED! PLEASE EVACUATE TO THE NEAREST EXIT! DO NOT USE THE STAIRS!" what the hell is going on!?
so we evacuated. Mariana was freaking out particularly, and understandably, because we had just heard about what was going on at VT, as it was still unfolding and people were still dying. and we were being evacuated from a college building.
I talked with Erik and Kelsey mostly, and we decided to migrate from right behind the building to behind another brick structure further away. we saw police officers roaming around the building. soon enough, we were admitted back in. what happened that caused this emergency exit?
someone on the fifth floor burned microwave popcorn.
do we have to live in fear that we have an evacuation every time that we have a cooking accident in a school!? hell, I was working across campus at UCF the night that a girl was taken away from her car, raped, and beaten. no stopping classes or even notifying us that anything was wrong.
my point is that we seek to blame others when we can't find answers. but the path back from a severe sense of grief is not through blame. from what I've seen about what happened, there was no one who willfully assisted this young man in killing these 32 people. no one abetted this crime. it was his choice, and his heinous crime.
we all want to take this personally, or we want to pretend it doesn't exist. it hits home to me for many reasons and it also knocks again on my door, seeing that the first two people killed were a girl named Emily Jane and a member of the marching band. it could have been me, or people close to me.
so instead of blaming and filling media sources with negativity and spewing hate, let's take this time to remember that we still have opportunities. appreciate your life, and the lives of those you love around you.
now that the massacre has occurred at Virginia Tech, we have to blame people who didn't send the shooter into a rubber room because of the disturbing things he wrote.
we have to blame the president of the university who couldn't evacuate the entire school when two people were killed in the dorms.
we have to blame anyone we can get our hands on. I don't buy it.
I personally think that for every twenty disturbed people out there who might at one point have the potential to commit a horrendous crime such as this, there is only person that would actually put something like this into action. regardless of disturbing warning signs, these things happen more often than you might think. in even freshman composition papers, people might write strange, bizarre, sexist, racist things that are rarely taken as any sort of threats. trust me - I've read more freshman comp papers in my writing center career than any one person needs to.
even the macabre expressions of the Virginia Tech killer could not have served as an undeniable crystal ball. if someone had recommended him to therapy on campus, who's to say that he would have gone, or that he could have really been helped? who do you blame then for a failed therapy case - a social worker who has saved and helped so many others but was unable to reach someone who happened to be a killer?
the further we get into a situation like this, the further we try to look for blame, the more ridiculous things get.
I personally don't think that the school could have shut everything down after the shootings on campus. I was on campus on 9/11, a day in which it seemed as though the world could come crashing down at any moment. I was in a bassoon lesson while the first plane hit, and I stayed in a practice room for a full hour before I exited Colburn Hall, saw forum cancelled, heard people talking about security at Boston's airport, and finally walked into the bookstore and heard what happened. by about 1pm that day, the campus was rolling tumbleweeds, but many students stayed on campus because they had nowhere else to go.
the truth about a campus like Virginia Tech is that it was not like Columbine High School. I've been to the VT campus - we went there on a pep band trip my sophomore year. beautiful campus, and hugely spread out. you didn't just have people moving in one place at one time, all going to do the same thing at once. you probably had kids who lived on nearby floors of the dorms where the first few students were killed. they might not have heard about it until many hours later. I don't see how an entire college campus, as I heard today, that is about the size of the City of Winter Park can be completely shut in two hours. it's just not a logistical possibility.
and as a result, something else strange happened when I was on campus at UCF before we knew the full scope and death count of what happened on Monday afternoon. I was in my piano class, about ready to take the harmonization part of my quiz, and we hear this intense siren. we're convinced at first it's a faraway fire truck, or something.
then a voice starts talking. in six long years as a music student at UCF, I've never heard anything like this. even a lights out/fire alarm during midterm juries in fall 2003. this voice on the alarm starts saying "ATTENTION! ATTENTION! AN EMERGENCY HAS BEEN REPORTED! PLEASE EVACUATE TO THE NEAREST EXIT! DO NOT USE THE STAIRS!" what the hell is going on!?
so we evacuated. Mariana was freaking out particularly, and understandably, because we had just heard about what was going on at VT, as it was still unfolding and people were still dying. and we were being evacuated from a college building.
I talked with Erik and Kelsey mostly, and we decided to migrate from right behind the building to behind another brick structure further away. we saw police officers roaming around the building. soon enough, we were admitted back in. what happened that caused this emergency exit?
someone on the fifth floor burned microwave popcorn.
do we have to live in fear that we have an evacuation every time that we have a cooking accident in a school!? hell, I was working across campus at UCF the night that a girl was taken away from her car, raped, and beaten. no stopping classes or even notifying us that anything was wrong.
my point is that we seek to blame others when we can't find answers. but the path back from a severe sense of grief is not through blame. from what I've seen about what happened, there was no one who willfully assisted this young man in killing these 32 people. no one abetted this crime. it was his choice, and his heinous crime.
we all want to take this personally, or we want to pretend it doesn't exist. it hits home to me for many reasons and it also knocks again on my door, seeing that the first two people killed were a girl named Emily Jane and a member of the marching band. it could have been me, or people close to me.
so instead of blaming and filling media sources with negativity and spewing hate, let's take this time to remember that we still have opportunities. appreciate your life, and the lives of those you love around you.