Blog Your Blessings Sunday

The VTech web­site is an excel­lent source of infor­ma­tion. I rec­om­mend that you visit it to get more infor­ma­tion about the memo­ri­als for the vic­tims, includ­ing the minute of silence to be observed tomor­row morn­ing as classes resume, and the resources avail­able to stu­dents.

Many other blogs and web­sites are dis­play­ing the VT Memo­r­ial Rib­bon as a show of sol­i­dar­ity. Feel free to grab it here and add it to your site.

I can’t add any pro­found obser­va­tions to the dis­cus­sion. All I can say is that, like the rest of the world, my heart goes out to the fam­i­lies and friends of the vic­tims. My thoughts are prayers are with the mem­bers of the admin­is­tra­tion and fac­ulty as they work to restore nor­malcy — what­ever that means now — to the cam­pus and com­plete the aca­d­e­mic year, as a dis­traught, scarred stu­dent body returns to the class­rooms tomorrow.

As an Amer­i­can, I urge the politi­cians to for­get party affil­i­a­tions and stop grand­stand­ing for the pur­pose of votes, focus­ing instead on the issue of gun con­trol and whether or not any­thing can be done to safe­guard our schools and work­places so as to pre­vent future tragedies.

Finally, I thank the Divine for the spirit of sur­vival and endurance that will, minute by minute, pull VTech through this tragedy. Here in North­ern Cal­i­for­nia, the peo­ple of Stock­ton know all about that spirit. Writ­ing today in the Stock­ton Record, colum­nist Michael Fitzger­ald said:

I like to think Stock­ton has an unclouded under­stand­ing when it comes to cam­pus shoot­ings such as the one at Vir­ginia Tech. We went through one.

Owing to the 1989 Cleve­land Ele­men­tary school­yard shoot­ing, in which five gram­mar school kids were killed and 30 wounded, many here know the real nightmare.

So when a cam­pus shoot­ing occurs, and the pun­dits and blog­gers thun­der away, I imag­ine many here clearly see how even intel­li­gent and informed observers can­not truly know a cam­pus shooting.

The sur­vivor of a cam­pus shoot­ing is sim­i­lar to being a cop, or a sol­dier in war, in one respect: Only those who have expe­ri­enced it truly know what it is like.

I imag­ine many Cleve­land School sur­vivors, lis­ten­ing to com­men­ta­tors, feel like an ex-soldier feels as his fam­ily opines on war around their din­ner table.

Of course, the fact that I was there that day at Cleve­land School, or that many locals were pro­foundly affected by it, does not auto­mat­i­cally make any judg­ment call superior.

Dif­fer­ent peo­ple may come away from such a tragedy with dif­fer­ent, even oppos­ing, ideas.

Still, many Stock­to­ni­ans under­stand a dimen­sion of cam­pus shoot­ing that oth­ers can­not — although, sad to say, mem­ber­ship in our macabre lit­tle club has grown con­sid­er­ably since 1989.

An equally valu­able expe­ri­ence for me was being a police beat reporter. Doing that job also ripped the veil off guns and showed the real­ity behind the slogans.

And slo­gans abound. Slo­gans, pas­sion and, worst of all, solu­tions aris­ing more out of need than reason.

Gun con­trol advo­cates are using Vir­ginia Tech as yet another argument.

Sec­ond Amend­ment types are say­ing the mas­sacre could have been stopped if Vir­ginia Tech were not a Pollyanna “gun-free zone” and stu­dents could carry con­cealed weapons.

The prob­lem with both of these ideas is, first, peo­ple are diag­nos­ing an idio­syn­cratic ail­ment and pre­scrib­ing a rem­edy for a vast Amer­ica. The sce­nar­ios out there are infi­nitely more var­ied that Vir­ginia Tech.

Sec­ond, they believe that, one way or the other, by more laws or fewer, more guns or fewer, guns are manageable.

To many gun con­trol advo­cates, guns are tragedy wait­ing to hap­pen. But that holds only if guns, or peo­ple, go wrong. Often, they per­form as they should.

To many Sec­ond Amend­ment types, guns are a value judg­ment. A black steel agent of jus­tice. But that holds only if guns pro­duce the desired out­comes. Obvi­ously, they often do not.

In a nation of 300 mil­lion peo­ple, there is no one value for guns. There are mil­lions. Guns serve every pur­pose from save-the-day hero­ism to the devil’s dirty work.

So, given guns, every out­come is pos­si­ble. There will be the kind of self-defense suc­cess story the NRA pub­lishes in its monthly mag­a­zine: armed old man fends off robber.

And there will be the sin­gle mother who, fear­ing her abu­sive ex, stashes a hand­gun atop her refrig­er­a­tor where it is found by her lit­tle boy who shoots his baby sis­ter to death.

That hap­pened right here in Stock­ton. Instead of self-defense, the out­come is a caul­dron of peren­nial grief.

The les­son of Cleve­land School, and the police beat, is that guns, like life, are fun­da­men­tally chaotic. We live as if guns are not, just as we live life, soothed by a calm­ing illusion.

To some extent, we impose our will on guns. As we must. But to some extent, we sim­ply can­not. Guns come with Shiva, cack­ling until the clip is empty.

Only the illu­sion of con­trol causes such shock when the true state is revealed. Then we assign blame, demand solu­tions, pin­ing for life to be orderly.

Because the alter­na­tive is primeval and fright­en­ing. Nobody moves to the sub­urbs for that.

That does not mean noth­ing can be done to pre­vent cam­pus shoot­ings, or gun vio­lence. Some order can be imposed.

But only some.

So we bow heads in sym­pa­thy for Vir­ginia Tech. That is some­thing we can do bet­ter than most, hav­ing faced this sort of abyss. There is really lit­tle else to do.

Indeed. There is lit­tle else we can do, except prayer that this will be the last such sense­less tragedy on Amer­i­can soil.

The bless­ing for today is this: The Divine Cre­ator will sus­tain those who grieve and those who sup­port them in them grief.

Blog Your Blessings

Tech­no­rati Tags: Blog your Bless­ings Sunday