I've never felt so closely touched by a headline-making tragedy before. Sept. 11, Columbine, the War in Iraq; the numbers of those dead have never brought me to tears. Monday, however, reading about the 33 people killed in my home state of Virginia left me in limbo between emotions: fear, hate, sadness, sympathy and confusion. This event took all of my words and optimism away.
What has surprised me, though, is how our reactions here at Tufts have reflected the lack of emotion from the shooter himself. The conversations with my friends about this event became almost standardized. We lamented how sad what happened in Virginia was and our awe about how it could have happened, but we then went on to complain about an exam on Thursday and a hangover. Right now, though, I'm sitting here with bio notes splayed across my desk and I can't look at them, because I refuse to accept that the loss of so many lives can mean nothing. I cannot understand how someone can take away 33 lives so easily, and what's more is I cannot understand why to us, safe on our hill at Tufts, this is just a passing event; why tomorrow, we'll have a new New York Times headline to brush aside in conversation.
What's different and demands our recognition about this headline is how closely it should touch us. Unlike the war in Iraq and the genocide in Darfur, the shooting at Virginia Tech happened at a university. This could happen at Tufts. No matter where, it only takes one person to feel alienated and dissatisfied with his or her environment to take such a tragic and irrational response.
Because this hits so close, our answer cannot be to brush it aside and accept the society that produced it. To do that is to wait for it to happen again somewhere else ... or here. I refuse to accept that this is something that could happen at Tufts.
The obvious way to deal with this is to look outward, to blame others. We could tell ourselves that this would never happen to us or to Tufts because we're socially normal. We could hold ourselves as superior to the students of Virginia Tech. Yet a reaction as empty as this only matches the emptiness of the event.
The optimistic and na've part of me wants to ask you to smile at everyone you pass on campus and talk to that girl sitting alone in the dining hall. Yet I can't trick myself into believing that you will do this or that this could truly change things. I recognize that an exterior coating of shiny and smiley fakeness will not put a sense of caring and connectedness back into our society.
The only reaction I will ask from you is to have one, to have an emotion. As a school, as a community and as a country, we need to admit that there's something wrong with a world that not only allows this to happen, but that also barely blinks when it does.
I urge you to talk about what happened in Virginia more deeply than a passing, "Hey, that was sad." I ask you to think more critically about what we do, what we say, who we talk to and why.
As college students, right now is the time for us to dream idealistically of a world where tragedies like this do not happen. We're young enough to keep hope that our world can change. We have the rest of our lives to be jaded by the world and accept tragedy as inevitable. Now, as college students, it is our duty to ask society for something better than what it is giving us.
I don't have an answer for how to make society a better place. We could start by insisting that Congress and state legislatures face up to the fact that a failure to limit the availability of handguns leaves them a share of the responsibility for events like this, but even this does not begin to reach to the root of some deeper problem with our society.
I am not writing to tell you that we should all hold hands and sugarcoat our problems. I have no idea how to change a society that accepts the death of 33 young adults. The only thing I ask of you is to react to this tragedy, to have a discussion of what this means. I hope you can take the time to stop and discuss this event with someone and give an emotion to it.
