The illusion of safety

Yesterday's shootings at Virginia Tech are on my mind. Like any normal human being, a tragedy like this shocks me, sickens me, angers me. Since the birth of my son, tragedies like this rock me at a deeper level. My first thought was of the parents of those students who were killed; I put myself in their place, receiving that phone call or waiting for hours and hours for the confirmation that their child was among the dead. It physically turns my stomach. The tears have been stinging my eyes since last night.

On November 1, 1991, I was a junior at the University of Iowa. It was a dreary, snowy Friday afternoon, and J. and I were preparing to go back to our hometown for the weekend. When he picked me up at my dorm, he told me about how he'd had to come a different route because there were all kinds of emergency vehicles and ambulances around the Pentacrest, the heart of our campus. Puzzled, but able to brush it aside in the way that narcissistic college students are able, we packed up the car and hit the road. We were no more than 20 miles out of town before announcers broke into the music and reported that several people on campus had been shot.

At first, the numbers that were reported were up to 25; later, it turned out that five people were killed, one person was critically injured, and the gunman had killed himself. We listened to the radio all the way home in shock. In the days before cell phones, there was no way to know if my brother and sister-in-law, who worked on campus, or any of our friends were among the victims; there was no way to call our parents to tell them we were okay. When we got to my parents' house, my mother's relief was palpable. Not sure when we'd left Iowa City, she'd tried repeatedly to call us, but the huge influx of calls from anxious parents and loved ones had jammed the lines.

After calling his parents, me, J., and my family sat in front of the NBC Nightly News, watching Tom Brokaw report on the "massacre" that had happened at our school. Eventually we were able to reach my brother and our friends and they were all okay. The details trickled in. The shooter was a graduate physics student from China. He was angry because his doctoral dissertation wasn't nominated for an honor. He killed the student who received it, along with three physics faculty members. He then walked across campus to an administrative building, killed the associate vice president for academic affairs, and seriously wounded a student employee, who survived but is now quadriplegic.

We returned on Sunday night to a quiet campus (in my insular world that revolved around myself, I didn't even about what it must have been like for my parents to send me back that Sunday night). Classes were cancelled the next day, and there was a memorial for the victims. Students stayed in their rooms, gathered with friends, processed the awful event. More than anything, I remember the quiet of that day and the days that followed. It seemed like time stopped for a little while. Even when classes resumed, people didn't talk much, and when they did, it was hushed.

The feeling I had then was remarkably similar to the one I have now. I felt stunned and deeply saddened, sick — but also felt as if I didn't really have a right to those feelings, because I didn't know any of the victims personally; I wasn't touched directly by the violence. Although I like to think that as a human being, we are all touched — injured — when something like this happens.

Last night I sat on my couch and watched the coverage while my two-and-a-half year old son lay sleeping quietly in our bedroom. He was there in our home, safe in our bed...but I didn't feel any reassurance. Watching the images of a bloody student being carried from a building, of the crackling of gunfire coming from a building on campus, a voice in my head said "This is the world you have brought your son into. This is the world you will send your son into. This is the world you DO send your son into."

Today, I feel a deep sense of guilt for that. That my selfishness, my desire for a child brought him here to this cruel, senseless, violent world — a world where college students are gunned down for no other reason than that they were there; a world where children are snatched from their beds, raped and murdered; a world where the president of our country talks about the tragic deaths of these college students while he sends other (often less-privileged) 19-year-olds to Iraq to be gunned down; a world where the president says that schools are supposed to be sanctuaries, while schoolchildren in Iraq face violence and death every day at his hands.

The hypocrisy of that is stunning to me. The words flying through the airwaves today are empty to me. "How can we stop this from happening again?" "Are schools in America safe?" "What needs to be done to increase security?"

The truth is that we cannot stop this from happening again. If we could, there would have been one school shooting in history and then no more. Schools in America are not safe. America is not safe. The world is not safe. Increased security will do nothing but add one more hurdle that a deranged murderer will not hesitate to overcome.

As I walked to the bus stop last night, on the same campus where I went to school and where I now work, I thought to myself how nothing really changed after the shooting in 1991. There's a memorial walkway, dedicated to one of the victims; there are anniversary remembrances and vigils that are more sparsely attended every year. But it's no more difficult for a disgruntled student with a gun to mow people down now than it was on October 31, 1991. How could it be? What, honestly, could be done?

The truth is that safety is a necessary illusion that we nurture in order to be able to function every day. When something like yesterday happens, it is momentarily shattered, and then the rationalization and the empty words and simply time and distance from the event let us build it up again. We need that illusion to prevent us from completely giving in to debauchery and instant self-gratification, to be productive, to raise our children as if, by some miracle, they will survive intact to live out their projected lifespan.

For breakfast this morning, I let my son have a cupcake, because the only words in my head that don't seem empty are these: enjoy today as much as you can.