It's about 6:30 a.m. on Tuesday April 17. I went to bed last night a little after one a.m. and woke up just a little bit ago to the sound of trains warning as they passed through the intersections of a sleeping Lincoln. A new friend asked the other day how I ended up in Nebraska after growing up in California. I suppose a decent answer would've been "it's nice to hear trains at night instead of sirens." It might've needed further explanation, maybe not, but the answer in large part is as simple as that.
Yesterday some 30 plus students were shot and killed by another student on the campus of Virginia Tech. I remember hopping on the Internet yesterday morning and seeing a Yahoo headline saying a student had been shot and killed on VA Tech's campus and thinking, why do people feel the need to resort to gun violence so often? Just a few hours later the situation became much more dire, and I spent the rest of the day juggling homework, class and being glued to CNN to try and figure out the same details the rest of a stunned nation wanted to know. It's frustrating to watch press conferences where media seem so eager to find a place for blame. Questions were shouted at the president of the campus as well as a local high ranking police official demanding to know why they hadn't done a better job of warning a campus of more than 25,000 students and 10,000 employees plus who knows how many visitors, that a tragedy had struck. How is anyone to fathom that a person could commit an act so heinous? Anything like that is just so random and unpredictable that officials can only do what they can to try and control the situation when in reality there is no great way to control someone with the type of mind to do such a thing. To try and place blame on a group of people who want nothing more than for innocent people to be able to go about their daily lives is a farce of monumental proportions.
Add to that a statement made by representatives for the White House in the first moments of a press conference: "The president believes that there is a right for people to bear arms, but that all laws must be followed," and you have to wonder how we've gotten so far away from the actual facts of the matter. People are dead. Virginia Tech's legacy as a public institution will forever be scarred. And America has a media that's trying to figure out how to make someone else the scapegoat and an administration trying to make a political issue out of the situation. It's quite appalling.
School's almost over for the year. The weather has turned nice and lately I've felt like there is a purpose in life and I'm getting closer by the day to finding it. Some coversations lately have got me to thinking about what my purpose might be. Hopefully the next few weeks will be filled with good times and creating memories that I'll hold dear because it's nice to know that people love me. Sometimes I lose track of that. Don't forget what's important in life is all I can say.
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