Monday, April 16, 2007

A moment of pause

Forgive the few days of absence. Trying to dig up a relevant irrelevancy. There were other topics but at the point of writing one event supersedes them. It was chosen for me.

32 students have just been murdered at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg VA. In the modern world's parade of savage murder in Bush's post September 11 world this appears a small statistic. Yet murder of a single person at an educational institution strikes close to home amplifying.

In the last few hours since I read about this horrible event I form my thinking to the awfulness and the sadness that alternates in a two moon tidal event. In a strange way it makes me thankful that at this moment my daughter and grand children are safe and sound so far as I know. Instinctively that was my thought. Yet that strong emotion transfers to incredible empathy for those parents who lost their children who also thought about their youngsters the same way I did. It is a day of great sorrow.

I am asking those few people who read this and other blogs to take a moment upon reading his article to take a moment of time to remember the victims of this cowardly onslaught. Remember that each number of those 32 from 1 to 32 to remember that each was a person who attended these places of higher learning with a youthful eye to the future.

At the bottom of this piece there is a long list of school shootings courtesy of Wikipedia. Note a spectacular increase of them in George W. Bush's new world. A single entry in this list makes for a list too long.

I am definitely old enough to remember the 1966 Texas School shootings from the cowardly sniper hiding in a dominating tower. It was a traumatic event socially. In the sequence of events that highlighted the socially optimistic Kennedy years that event shook that positive world view tremendously in the North American social structure. In many ways it was worse than the Kennedy assassination. Students have no security detail.

The next moment in this twisted sequence is Kent State. Numerically it doesn't rank very high except that the murders were committed by the US Government. In a strange way this let the evil genii out of a plugged vessel. It gave permission to any demented person or organization to attack the heart of a society, the once hallowed places of learning.

For Canadians the next major trauma fell upon innocent students at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal PQ. Such a terrible event was twisted by every side. It lead to the Canadian gun registry. It prompted feminists to rant against every male icon in Canadian society. It was from the start committed by a demented mind who created victims in his sick mind which happened to be women. The answer was the gun registry which doesn't work. Rather governments went onto not only emasculate men in society it gutted the mental health network that might have prevented such a sick act.

On this day though. We cannot figure out or postulate methods to deter such terrible and tragic events. Rather we should focus our thoughts (and prayers if one possesses a belief system) to the directly effected individuals victims and their families.




Sources
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_shooting

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89cole_Polytechnique_massacre


.
Posted by at
Labels: , , , , , , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)