Vitriol!
April 19th, 2007. Published under General. 1 Comment.
I’ve been pretty quiet about the whole mess at Virginia Tech. Yes, it’s horrible what happened and my sympathy goes out to the families of those killed.
But I’m getting so sick and tired of the “big question” that the media keeps thumping like a tribal war drum: “how could this have been avoided?”
Unfortunately, nothing could have been done.
This kid was disturbed, obviously, but expert after expert keeps coming out and saying that there’s no way in hell the school or the faculty could have accurately seen the signs and stopped this kid from snapping and mowing down everyone he could.
Now, what’s pissing me off is that now there are all these colleges around the country gearing up to “develop an action plan” to handle situations like these.
When are people in this country going to pull their head out of their asses and stop living in this reactionary-action society we’re in now? Nothing EVER happens in this country until something happens to make us react. After 9/11 - every city had to come up with a “terrorism plan” to deal with an attack. I would bet anyone $100 that if any terrorists tried to attack a US city again, none of these “plans” would work. Why? Because they were set up to deal with the type of attack that happened on 9/11. Logic dictates that the terrorists wouldn’t use the same type of attack in that hypothetical next attack.
Same thing happens at the airport. Some whack-job had explosives in his shoes - now we all have to take our shoes off for intense inspection. Another crazy tries to take some flammable type of liquid onto a plane and now I can’t take my bottle of Diet Pepsi (which is not an explosive) or my normal-sized bottle of contact solution in my carry on!
Do the people “in charge” really think that once we caught someone doing these things that they would TRY IT AGAIN?! Hell no!
No wonder we live in a “society of fear”…all we do is react to the shit that’s happening around us, rather than be a little more proactive and pay attention to what’s going on around you and doing something about it! No, we have to live in our nice, safe, little suburban bubbles until some Big Bad Scary thing comes along and burst that happy pink bubble - then we lock ourselves in our houses with Grandpa’s arsenal and watch Fox News 24/7 getting more scared and paranoid.
“Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave?” Yeah right.
I have a hard time calling what happened at VT a tragedy. What happened after Katrina, that was a tragedy. Today, there are people who STILL are homeless and there are areas of New Orleans that look EXACTLY as they did right after the hurricane. This war that we’re in that we will NEVER win and has cost us over 3,300 soldiers (not to mention the number of other soldiers and civilians that have died because of this clusterfuck) to date, THAT’S a tragedy. What happened at VT was horrible, unfortunate and sadly unavoidable - but when compared to these atrocities, it’s not unique. Hell, after Katrina hit, we had FULL CONTROL over what would happen and that got all fucked up. I noticed it only took Bush a day to go to VT - when it took him more than 4 days to visit New Orleans, the site of the worst natural disaster to EVER hit this country.
Great job!
I’m getting rambly now, so I’ll just leave it at that.
Jennifer on April 19th, 2007
A friend of mine posted something I found insightful about how everyone is trying to get in this guy’s head and figure out how we could have stopped him or helped him, or what all of his messages and weird rambling writings meant.
The answer? You can’t. No amount of microscopic analysis of the word Ishmael or dissection of his recently watched netflix is going to tell you what was in this guy’s mind.
Sometimes the answer is, he was a fucking nut. Crazy people live in their own heads, a place no one else can get to or understand. That’s part of what makes them crazy. So trying to figure out why this one crazy dude did things will have no benefit on the next crazy that decides to freak out and stalk his girlfriend or write insane manifestos or start shooting people at random, because *that* crazy dude is going to be in a totally different place anyway. Save your breath.