VA Tech is a dream come true for the "fringes"

I suppose there is very little we can claim as a positive from this terrible thing that has happened, but I for one found a great deal of comfort and pride in seeing the reactions of the students and University leaders over the past few days. Most notably was the reaction of the student body toward President Bush and the University President. Their very lengthy ovation at the introduction of both told me a few things about the general character of the students there, and really made me proud to be a citizen of both Virginia and America. After all the criticism of the school administration, I think the question was answered in that moment about whether or not the people closest to this tragedy were in support of their President Charles Steger. We all know that college campuses in general are not that friendly to Republican Presidents either, but the show of respect for President Bush was yet another example of putting differences aside for the sake of something bigger. For all the attempts at trying to pull anger and hatred out of people while they were at their lowest moments, I think the fringe elements of our society were silenced by the desire of that commmunity to pull together instead of breaking apart.

It is simply amazing that there are people in our society (and around the globe) that insist on using this awful event for self promotion of their own fringe agenda. The huge gathering of students for the vigil held on the drill field and the memorial services remind me that the majority of Americans hold similar values and points of view, but the fringes get the airtime because they offer up the greatest opportunity to "shock" us into wanting to watch something extraordinary. Normal people don't make headlines, only the fringes get the headlines. The photos of that nutcase Cho are going to be forever immortalized in history as a symbol of what is wrong in America, I would prefer to focus on what makes America strong.

The issues that keep getting played across our televisions are much less than assignment of blame, gun control and our responsibility to keep everyone safe. The real issues are about our freedom and how we react as Americans to pull together in times of crisis instead of allowing the fringes to pull us apart. I would put this idea out there for everyone to consider, that the time in our history as a nation with the greatest personal freedoms would be the period of time following the Amercian Revolution. That would also be the time of greatest chaos in our history of government, because those 2 things are generally mutually exclusive. We are most comfortable with systems and programs in place to repress anarchy, which generally means we slowly move from a free society to some sort of democratic socialism at best, and situations where a single ruler that controls everything is in power at the worst.

The far left is taking the stance that we should remove all guns from society, because that will make us safe. If only the government had guns, then we would not have to worry. Wow. Where would we have been in 1776 with that concept? I suppose if no one had guns then they would have to find another way to kill each other, so gun deaths would decline, but at the same time we would give up our Constitutional right to bear arms and leave our society open to manipulation and control by anyone that had guns. Giving up our personal rights will never make us safer, only open the door to a slow slide toward control moving to a central source of power. I suppose that is why the Europeans have hit us so hard with our "gun society," they have had more history and time to move toward socialiasm than we have, which is exactly where we will end up if we give up our freedoms.

The far right is taking the stance that everyone should have guns and that will make us safe. I am not so sure of that either, giving all the students at Tech a gun just seems that we will kill 33 students over a year's time on Saturday nights instead of all at once. I have even heard some people pushing the idea that they all deserved to die as a representation of God's retribution for the partying and sex that goes on. Wow. I don't even know where to start, but the idea that God planned all this to teach us a lesson is beyond my comprehension. God loves each one of us in a way that we cannot imagine, and wants to be in a personal and meaningful relationship with us that involves a choice on our part. We must separate this idea of Old Testament retribution from the consequences of our actions, when we choose to do something outside of acceptable behavior then we face consequences for those actions, but God wants us to turn to Him first and then we will want to change our behaviors because we live within that relationship. He did not come to condemn the world but to save it.

The fact remains that we have a very terrible and unusual situation brought on by one person's sadistic actions. If I hear another talking head suggest that we failed Cho as a society because we did not identify him and get him into the right program, so that he could be reformed and rejoin as a meaningful contributor to our society, I am just going to throw up. The guy was a nut, sadistic, crazy, whatever adjective you want to use that describes someone so unbalanced that they could even consider the act, much less plan it out so that he would be immortalized by his actions. If anything he needed to be identified and locked up for the rest of his life, instead of playing the role of "It was his societal condition," "he just needed help," "our gun society is to blame," "his privacy was more important," "if we just could have reached out to him..." There was nothing that could have prevented this guy from going postal. It would have been better if some boyfriend of a stalked girl on campus would have taken him out before he could kill all those people, but even that is a pretty hollow victory.

You could maybe make the point that we sanction violence on TV which allows these things to happen, but the reality is that we can only "vote" on whether that violence is acceptable with our pocketbooks. I would agree that what we watch on TV and the movies has a very negative affect on our actions, but we allow it to happen because we watch and advertisers profit from it. We have a choice, if something is inappropriate then we have a duty to letting those advertisers know we won't be purcahsing their producsts as a result. Wonder why Imus finally got fired? Because that is exactly what happened. We not only have the rights to our personal freedom, we have the obligation to identify people and situations that are outside acceptable behavior and remove them from society. We can get all crossed up in what is acceptable, but I am pretty certain that killing people would be considered unacceptable, and violence that depicts and glorifies those situations should be considered the same.

We live in a free society, where people are free to fly into towers and shoot college students. There is no means of protecting people in a free society from events like this, nor should there be beyond reasonable measures from law enforcement to detect and identify nutcases like Cho, hopefully before he is able to kill, but certtainly not to second guess their actions when they are trying to protect us within an open society. We have to use these terrible situations to pull together and celebrate our freedoms, amid the grief and anguish from those families that are enduring great pain and sacrifice. We cannot let this situation overshadow the fact that life is transient and there are different views about the sanctity of human life over the globe. Over 170 innocent people were killed in Iraq yesterday, but we don't seem as upset about that as the college kids because it is far away and we are used to them killing each other on a regular basis. Our european neighbors are incensed about the evils of American society as a result of the shootings, but they ignore Muslim extremists who are executing and beheading people at the same time. What am I missing? We have to accept by our very nature that America is open to this type of tragedy, for the benefit of enjoying our individual freedoms we have the potential for disaster every day. We can fall prey to trying to fix it, which can only result in the loss of those freedoms, or we can pick each other up when the dust settles and gather together as Americans devoted to maintaining those freedoms as a tribute to those who gave their lives.