Senseless

I woke up in a pretty good mood, ready to create meaningful learning experiences for my students, participate in the civic and artistic life of my city, and contribute to the cultural richness of the contemporary world with pithy ruminations on matters of genuine importance to anyone fortunate or tasteful enough to peruse my blog.

Then I went online and read about the shootings at Virginia Tech and everything I had in mind to do seemed pointless and absurd. I just sat at my desk reading various accounts of the massacre, utterly defeated by the tragedy of it all.

Surrounded by college students in my building, I couldn’t help but think how awful the scene in Virginia must have been. I tried not to imagine our students as victims or even as the shooter himself; I thought of the hundreds of people whose lives have been irretrievably altered by the insanity of just one person.

And god, to be a parent of a student there; you finally get your child mostly grown up and sent off to some place you expect they’ll be safe to study and learn, and then this. It makes me just want to open a small business and have the kid work for me.

I read the emerging commentaries and got pretty disgusted by the predictable posturing by fans and foes of gun control, and while I can understand people’s anger over how the college’s administration handled things, I don’t think its fair to point fingers at them.

If anything’s to blame, it’s probably testosterone; the one thing all these tragedies have in common is that they’re perpetrated by males; we need men control more than anything.

But now here I am doing the same thing I was disgusted by: using this tragedy to grind my own axe about something else, when what I have to say doesn’t even matter.

I think I’ll just shut up and go be kind to my family.