current | archives | profile | mail | notes | extras | brains | random | host
Reflections on the tragedy at Virginia Tech.
[2007-04-16] @ [3:46 p.m.]
The only thing people seemed to be able to talk about today was what happened at Virginia Tech today. It is scary just thinking about it. At least 31 dead and twenty plus wounded. They're calling it the worst shooting incident in U.S. history.
What even more scary is how it impacts people here at my university. I live in Virginia. I know people who go to Tech. I know of people from high school who went to Tech. Half of the students in Virginia seem to go to Tech. The campus has 26,000 students and its own zip code. I visited the campus but didn't apply. It is beautiful up there but it was a big place and that is what scared me off about applying.
Yet with the idea that almost everyone on campus knows someone at Tech, including myself, a lot of people where trying to call friends, family, etc. I know two people at Tech. Emily is one of them; we've been friends since I was eight and she was nine. I managed to get through and I was glad to hear she was all right. I tried to call another person I knew, someone I went to high school with and saw over winter break and exchanged phone numbers with. I wasn't able to get through because the circuits were busy. I've been hearing that a lot.
I remember hearing about Columbine. I was eleven if I remember. It scared the hell out of me and then the public schools went nuts. I remember them emphasizing lock down procedures, tightening security, etc. Things like this never happened at my schools. We were one of the better off school in the city.
CNU is like that too in some respects. It is a small campus, almost everyone knows everybody. That was one of the things that attracted me here (except getting screwed over by housing). I also feel safe here, especially when I'll sometimes walk across campus at three in the morning.
What happened at Tech unsettles me though. I saw the headline earlier this morning when there was one at least confirmed dead and I really didn't take much thought to it, relating it to be similar to what happened at the beginning of their school year. (An escaped convict made his way to Tech, killed a sheriff's deputy in the process if I recall). Two hours later when I went to check my hotmail accounts, the headline was bigger as was the number of the dead.
From my information, no one knows why it happened. No one knows why those students had to die or get shot. I just pray that those wounded get better soon and those who died ended up going peacefully to whatever afterlife they believed if it be God or some lesser known religion.
I know that Emily is all right, thank god, but I hope the other person I know that goes to Tech is all right.
The thought is scary of what human nature is truly capable of and of what can happen when you least suspect it. Being a university student brings it close to home. Being a university student at a public Virginia college brings it ever closer as strange as that might sound.
I just hope for the best for everyone.
Till later.
So, quick thanks for the image from confusedvision, under the Creative Commons License 2.0. The inspiration came from Lacuna Coil, an awesome gothic metal band from Italy.
This place on the web is fueled by diaryland, firefox, psp 9, caffeine in any form, books, slavic literature, and random bursts of ideas. With the exception of the image
and lyrics, the design and code involved is mine. Graize.
