and next.
I’m just going to write one small follow-up to my last post, because it’s on my mind and because it’s how I figure things out.
I have been reading endlessly about the Virginia Tech shootings, and I don’t know why, but I have been. Yesterday at work, where I am usually judicious in my internet browsing, I loaded and reloaded the New York Times and CNN and USA Today over and over, and I came home and did the same. Yesterday I mostly wanted to learn about the shooter, to try to understand.
And today I read about each victim, I scrolled down their myspace pages and played their homemade mp3s. I just wanted to recognize them. I wanted to honor them somehow, and it was all I could think of.
From these processes I have had two unexpected and perhaps inappropriate responses, and I want to write about them. I’m not expecting them to make any more sense for it. But then maybe I can leave this behind, which is the unsatisfying thing we all do when we have the privilege.
The first response came from learning about the shooter, and it was, simply, relief. Because I was so very afraid this would be about something, the way people sometimes decide that the best way to make a point is to kill other people. When killing is supposedly about something there is such anger in its wake, and the anger ricochets and careens and the casualties build for long after the event. But here was this young guy, and he was just terribly, terribly, sick. He has been sick for a long time, and that sickness erupted in a tragic, violent way. But there is nothing to feel for it but sadness. There is no revenge and no martyrdom and no divisive backlash. Just sadness.
And the second response came from looking at the thirty two little photos and the hastily gathered facts attached to them, and I guess the best word I can pin on it is awe. In this terrible random sample of thirty two people are these thirty two marvelous lives, linguists and hydrologists who write songs and dance salsa, a man studying cerebral palsy and a girl in an engineering sorority and a dreadlocked activist, and a survivor of the holocaust who made his life in a quiet Virginia town teaching aeronautics across from a German class. People from
And I think it is easy to forget that in every thirty two people are thirty two stories, families and plans and hobbies and homes, languages and pasts and passions. I am awed by these lives. I am awed by how we dream of bigger things. I am awed by how we travel and work and sacrifice for these dreams, how we improvise as we go, how we cobble ourselves together from all the people and places we are part of, and the things we love. I am awed by how we try and try to make this work, though we fuck it up again and again and terribly, though we fail each other in unsalvageable ways.
posted by tortaluga @ 9:34 PM
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