Words and reason fail when faced with such horror

April 17, 2007

It’s hard to know what to say about yes­ter­day’s hor­rif­ic mas­sacre at Vir­ginia Tech, where a gun­man killed 32 peo­ple (at lat­est count) in two sep­a­rate inci­dents. Is this an indict­ment of an Amer­i­can cul­ture of vio­lence? Vir­ginia Tech has a strong mil­i­tary tra­di­tion, so is our war men­tal­i­ty to blame? Guns?, can we blame guns? Or how about the alien­ation of so many young peo­ple in our society?
Any answer seems glib and besides the point. This isn’t the time to be a pun­dit. Peo­ple snap for all sorts of rea­sons and usu­al­ly for mul­ti­ple rea­sons that can nev­er real­ly be untangled.
Like all humans, I’m shocked and sad­dened. I’ve spent time on the cam­pus and the stu­dents and fac­ul­ty I met were always warm and hos­pitable, gra­cious and open. What must they be going through? Think of the fear of the trapped stu­dents, the fear of par­ents turn­ing on the news, the fear of sur­vivors who will have to live with the mem­o­ries of this night­mare for the rest of their lives. I add my hum­ble words to the mil­lions of prayers that have been mur­mured these last twenty-four hours. May God com­fort the vic­tims alive and dead, includ­ing the shoot­er, who must cer­tain­ly be a vic­tim of some­thing himself.
How do we stop the vio­lence? How do we show our youth that vio­lence is not the way? And how do we get these damned guns out of their hands?

It’s hard not to make the connection

June 21, 2003

In Iraq, U.S. sol­diers are blar­ing the sound­tract to ‘Apoc­a­lypse Now’ to psych them­selves up to war:

“With Wag­n­er’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ still ring­ing in their ears and the clat­ter of heli­copters over­head, sol­diers rammed vehi­cles into met­al gates and hun­dreds of troops raid­ed hous­es in the west­ern city of Ramadi”

Mean­while in my home­town of Philadel­phia four teenagers lis­tened to the Bea­t­les’ ‘Hel­ter Skel­ter’ over forty times before attack­ing and beat­ing to death one of their friends.
   Hor­rif­ic as both sto­ries are, what strikes me is the choice of music. ‘Hel­ter Skel­ter’ and most of the music on ‘Apoc­alpse Now’ were writ­ten in the late 1960 and ear­ly 70s (the movie itself came out in 1979). Why are today’s teenagers pick­ing the music of their par­ents to plan their attacks? Can’t you kill to Radio­head or Linkin Park? Could­n’t the Philly kids have shown some home­town pride and picked Pink? Why the Oldies Music? Seri­ous­ly, there have been some topsy-turvy gen­er­a­tional sur­pris­es in the sup­port and oppo­si­tion to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Is there some sort of strange fetish for all things 70s going on here?