Senseless....
That's how many of us felt when watching the scenes following the shootings of 32 students and faculty at Virginia Tech University on Monday.
How could it have happened again?
This was on another level of magnitude from prior school shootings. It's already being called "the deadliest civilian shooting in U.S. history." All told, 33 people are dead and a rural campus's peace shattered along with the lives of many people, families, and communities. Horrific is a word that comes to mind.
As part of the Colorado Progressive Coalition's community, we've seen - together - similar, unexplainable incidents happen before, including eight years ago in our own backyard at Columbine High School.
Too many of us have lives that are touched by violence and premature death. Among the thousands of people in CPC's community, like you, who will receive this message are people who have lost family members due to lack of access to health care, a form of economic violence. We know people who have lost a friend to an anti-abortion extremist and an acquaintance in the World Trade Center, lost a parent to fundamentalist violence abroad, and lost friends and family members on the streets of Denver to neighborhood gun violence. Our CPC community also includes a friend who graduated from Virginia Tech, having lived in the dorm where the first students were killed on Monday.
We also know people who have been victims of violence for just being who they are, because of their race, gender, national origin, and sexual orientation or gender identity.
Our country has become desensitized to these incidents, almost as if it is just a part of living in the U.S., a perverse trade-off for our freedom, it would seem. We surely react to senseless acts of violence when they happen on a magnitude like that at Virginia Tech or to a star athlete but there's much that we let pass.
While not just an American phenomenon, a culture of violence breeds further violence. Ready access to guns and ammunition - like what happened in Virginia - surely plays a role and we were stunned to learn that 250,000 of the same model of gun used in Monday's shootings are made each year in the U.S.
But this is not all. As Americans we play shoot 'em up video games, watch grisly crime dramas, and line up for gratuitously violent movies. Whether we want to own up to it or not, violence is an accepted frame of our daily lives.
And then there is our foreign policy. The U.S.'s role in the world today is not that of a benevolent peacekeeper, less so than ever under the Bush Administration. While not to minimize the Virginia Tech shootings, here's what CU Law Professor and Rocky Mountain News columnist Paul Campos points out about "the context of what happens every day in Iraq."
Campos writes that "The United Nations reports about 100 civilians a day were shot, blown up, tortured to death or otherwise murdered in Iraqi civil war violence in 2006." He goes on to add that a Johns Hopkins University study says that this estimate may be far lower than what is actually going on in Iraq. Just yesterday, at least 190 people died in Baghdad in one day's bombings.
So, when the great poet, Nikki Giovanni, spoke at Virginia Tech - the school where she teaches - on Tuesday, she said that "No one deserves a tragedy." She also said that "We are better than we think, and not quite what we want to be. We are alive to the imagination and the possibility that we will continue to invent the future through our blood and tears, through all this sadness."
Wise words indeed and certainly no simple solutions, just sadness. There's no legislative action alert to share in this message, it's not that tidy. We are thankful to be part of a community that works for peace, with justice, for human dignity and understanding, and that strives to model the world in which we seek to live. We know that there's much work to do....
Thank you.
In peace,
Bill Vandenberg,
on behalf of CPC
P.S. Tell us what you think and send a reply to this message |
