LOSS FOR WORDS
There’s nothing really funny to say about what has happened this week. At best, it should serve as a reminder that we are never safe, no matter how isolated we might feel at times. 33 dead, that’s the number of Americans killed in Iraq in the past 1 & 1/2 weeks. 33 , multiply that by 10 and you’ve got the number of people (the majority of whom are children) sold into slavery every single day. Terrible things happen to people all over the world in greater numbers than 33 every hour. So what makes this so much worse?…Maybe it’s not; maybe after all the talking-heads (myself included) have our “Jerry Springer’s Final Thoughts” on this situation we might have an answer. I doubt it, but maybe. For me, I will take a few things from this massacre-because that’s what it was: 1) The university could’ve better protected the students and it did not. VT chose not to do anything about this until it was too late to simply say “mea culpa.” 2) These kids were just trying to get an education to better themselves-enjoying many of the privileges that people my age are fighting for in Iraq right now. Someone goes to war in order to receive an education while someone else getting an education steps into class AND into the middle of a warzone…it just sucks. 3) And last of all, despite this, this is still the best country in the world. I in no way intend to mitigate the suffering of other generations of Americans, nor do I intend to quantify the atrocities that people have suffered, but in the past few years ALONE…ALONE, we as a nation have had to deal with the following: Katrina, Operation Cluster-fuck, Columbine, Columbia, Paducah, Jonesboro, 9/11, global-warming and every other thing that kids of my generation-the current generation have been forced to deal with…And despite all of this shit and despite the politicians who simply do not care about the citizenry (and I am not just talking about Republicans in this regard) this is still the best country in the world. Whoa is the world.
It’s something to think about before this happens again, and rest-assured, it will; America alone has enough psychopaths to destroy the world a million times over-you might even know some of these people, they could be your neighbors, lawyers, pharmacists, federally elected officials, etc, etc. A friend of mine was recently trying to quit smoking and I spoke to him yesterday as he was puffing away and spewing out the carbon dioxide effluvium back into the atmosphere. “What’s the point?” he said. “The way things are going, who knows if I will even make it to the age where I can get lung cancer?” He’s exactly right. We are not safe ANYWHERE and it would be fatuous to believe that guns are simply to blame: nay, it’s much more than that; something dark and insidious that cannot be squashed or nipped in the proverbial “bud.” The events that transpired in Blacksburg, Virginia were not a warning, they were a reminder…We are not safe, and probably, never will be.
For any of you who have not seen Sir Ian McKellan on ‘Extras,’ I feel incredibly (yes, I know it’s another adverb, I needed it to enhance the gravity of the situation) sorry for you.
