News

Okay, guys, for those who have let us know that they use the blog as an escape, today ain’t going to be it. I’ve tried not to have the blog reflect some of the headlines, but it feels false. Like I’m writing, but it’s not true. So today, I’ll write what I struggled not to write yesterday.
For those who have written to us to let us know they are personally touched by the tragedy in Virginia, our thoughts and prayers are with you, still. I’ve been thinking why this event has touched me and so many others so deeply. We hear of larger death tolls from Iraq and other parts of the world, daily, or nearly daily. So why is one thing a horrible headline that we sorrow over, but we go on. It does not stop most of us in our tracks, and prey upon the mind. Why are the events at Virginia Tech so much more painful?
I think first, it’s here. Let’s just be honest. We feel for other people, but it’s not us. It’s not happening on American soil. It makes me think how must everyone feel that are living in Iraq and elsewhere. How must they feel when the headlines are living down the road from them. How must every day people feel when the war report is their street?
That is why Virgina Tech has been so hard, I think. It is here. It is a place where we like to think we can send our children to learn and grow, and be safe. We all like to think that academia is a place of refuge. It is that ivory tower that the poet’s speak of. Well, yes, and no.
Anyone who has ever spent time on a campus, knows the ivory tower is also a pressure cooker. But I do not think that the shooter (why do I never use his name? Because I’m tired of people getting famous off of being crazy or evil. Yeah, he’s dead, so the fame is posthumous, but I’m still tired of it.) I don’t think the shooter was driven crazy by pressures on the campus. When someone snaps this badly, it would have happened anyway, at some point. Sometimes people just start looking for excuses, or their minds break so badly that excuses are invented that seem real to them.
I have not read the plays that the shooter wrote and have been posted on the web. I do not intend to. Perhaps if I read them, I too will see what some have said, that his violence was telegraphed in his writing. The fact that he wrote violent plays was a warning sign.
If my family had thought that, they would have had been into a therapist’s office at fourteen. My first completed story was a blood bath. Everyone died, and horribly. Only the baby lived to crawl into the wilderness to die a slow and lingering death. My family did the best thing they could have done, they patted me on the head, said this is great, and ignored it.
You guys know what I write. I would hate for people to read it and say, it reflects what I am likely to do in my real life. It’s fiction. It’s bleeps from the imagination. Please, guys, do not start reading people’s work in college classes and thinking that every person who writes scary or violent is dangerous. The vast majority of us are more harmless than the rest. We vent our anger on paper, not on other people.
We haven’t heard anymore reports of people on campus picking on Asian students. If it’s not happening anymore, I am so glad. Thank you all for being rational in the face of something so irrational. If you guys are picking on people and we’re just not hearing about it, please stop.
Remember the Oklahoma bombing? The news were reporting that it was Arabic terrorists. I didn’t buy it, I don’t know why. It smelled home grown, and it was. The bad guy looked like a thousand other Midwestern guys. But people had already done hateful things to other Americans that just looked Arabic. Don’t repeat that mistake.
Yeah, 911, was people of a certain ethnicity, but the guy who shot up the Lube’s restaurant. The guy who had the highest kill count in a mass shooting until the one at Virginia Tech, was a white guy, nothing but apple pie and America if you looked in his face. The monster doesn’t have a skin color. The monster is always us. Always looking out of the mirror. That is a rule that every policeman learns early. You want the bad guys to look like bad guys, very few of them do. The most successful are invisible. They are usually the guy, or woman, you’d most like your kid to ask for directions if they were lost. The monster hides in plain sight, always.
That last little paragraph reflects some of the reasons I stopped doing research on serial killers for awhile. You start looking at everyone and wondering. Add research on child abduction and pedophilia, and you’ll go crazy. I’ve had three different policemen tell me that I’ve got to chill. That you can’t live on yellow alert, you’ll burn yourself out. It’s a speech they usually give to other cops. Sometimes, I take my work home with me a little too much.
Yesterday was our national day of mourning for the terror that has happened. I tried not to write about how I felt, but I can’t help it. I’m here, and I mourn with my country.
It makes me think, though, how must all the other countries feel when the headlines, the body counts, are in their country? Do they feel like this? It makes all those headlines that you sometimes skim over, real. The people dying are real. The people mourning are real.
As we mourn as a nation, maybe we can try and take away something of worth from all the pain. Remember that different isn’t dangerous. That crazy doesn’t have a color. That as we search for reasons why he did it, we will find none. Not real reasons. Because for every thing that happened to him, that people say, aha, that’s it; the same things happened to hundreds of people and they didn’t get a gun and start shooting.
I haven’t seen anyone try and blame violent media yet; movies, video games, books, just his writing. Remember, that the victims he shot, the people that didn’t fight back, or jump his butt, were raised on the violent movies, video games, books, etc . . . If violence in American media causes the real life violence these students should have risen up in a mass and killed his ass. They did not. They did what most of us would have done. They hid. They blocked doors. They tried to survive. Do not let anyone blame anything for what has happened, for why he did it. Do not let any of the blame be shifted from the person who held the gun. Do not let them blame the person who sold the gun, or the people who didn’t file charges on the stalking. There is no blame anywhere but on the shooter. Make him take the full responsibility. No more trying to blame other people, or other things. Put the blame on the person who does the deed.
If you do the bad thing, then you are the bad person. No excuses, no rationals. Let the shooter take the responsibility for his deeds. Don’t look for scapegoats, when we have a perfectly good mass murderer that truly is to blame.