Unbelievable Tragedy

After I heard the news of the terrible massacre that happened yesterday, I went online to read about it and was greeted with chilling statistics: the highest body count ever in history on a school campus was in Texas, and made by a gunman on a tower sniping students below. He killed 16 before the police shot him down. The highest body count not on campus in a single incident happened when a man drove his truck into an eating establishment and then shot and killed about 23 people.

The cowardly wretch in this case killed 32 before he blew himself into oblivion. 32. That's double the next highest. On NPR yesterday, I heard an eyewitness account from a janitor, speaking in the rolling colloquial tones of Virginia, describing how he had seen a body in a pool of blood on the floor, approached to try and identify it, and looked up to see the gunman himself, with an automatic handgun, in a hat, hooded sweatshirt, and blue jeans. This seems to be the uniform of the bad people of our times, as opposed to a black top hat, cape, and twirling mustachio. The gunman shot at our janitor, and missed, but the narrator described feeling the bullets whizzing right past his head. He ran, and was able to get downstairs without taking any injuries. The tale shocked me.

Are we to make our institutes of learning fortresses, complete with SWAT teams in full uniform prowling the campus, ready for action? What is it that is missing in our society, what plague that creates these monsters? Some people would say that some people are just born bad. Maybe you could blame it on a chemical imbalance, who knows? and at this point, we will never know for sure. But I can't help but wonder what his friends or parents ignored that could have changed this whole situation. How does a person amass an arsenal in secret? What pain in his soul could only be mended with the destruction of everyone in his path?

Every day in the media, massive tragedy is spoken of in mildly sympathetic tones, read off of thousands of pieces of paper in thousands of television journalist's hands. Violence is nothing more than a daily occurrence on a bulleted list. Teenagers are raised by television and video games, taught nothing of moral standards by their exhausted parents, who must work as long as their bodies can handle just to pay their hefty sub-prime mortgages and credit card bills. There is no time. No time to tell them no, no time to explain. Our generations water themselves down in terrible school systems and weary tenured teachers. The sense of community has been wiped from the face of America, it's each man for himself. The search for the American Dream continues, but the people who are searching lack the tools and tenacity of our fathers.

Something must come, some alarm buzzing on a global scale. We are slowly devolving. Somehow, our collective pride must be lowered a notch, and we must perceive others as being as important to us as ourselves.