Dear Hokie Community,
Still profoundly sad, I extend my deepest sympathy to all Hokies everywhere, and to all who are in sympathy with them in these dark hours. A college graduate myself, and the father of two wonderful young women college graduates, I can not fathom the pain suffered by so many as a result of a senseless, tragic, horrific act.
The following words offer a perspective better than I can voice:
REMARKS BY PROVOST CAROLYN “BIDDY” MARTIN (Cornell University, Ithace, NY)
“…
“The media rushes, understandably, to cover the event, and the events
become spectacle, compounding the effects of depersonalization as
journalists and the public press for immediate and abbreviated
responses and analyses. How extraordinary, under those
circumstances, were the efforts of the students and alumni to express
their love of Virginia Tech, of one another, to hold open the gap
between their experience of the place and the violence and death that
were coming to define it. They had been robbed of friends, of
classmates, and of teachers; they had had the taken-for-granted
safety of the dorm room and the classroom shattered. They have lost
for now a sense of safety in the thrilling openness of university
campus. They did not want, in addition, to be robbed of their
experience of the place or their attachment to it; did not want their
murdered friends, classmates and teachers to be remembered only for
the horrifying way in which their lives were taken. Just as the
names and stories of the victims began to give a human scale and
texture to an otherwise surreally traumatic and depersonalizing
event, so, too, the students’ reserve and their claims to the
totality of their experience and attachment began to restore to them
all that they have learned and loved at Virginia Tech. In their
expressions of pride, they fight to have life and attachment prevail
over the isolation, illness, and rage that appear to have been major
factors in this horror.“…”
In due time, there will be well thought out and executed responses, changes, and good will come from the bad, because that is the way most of us are. It will be very hard work changing our culture. It will take a generation at a minimum. While there are opportunities to improve gun management, the necessary responses will not be about gun management. While there will be changes in the law and regulations, any such improvements will not prevent another occurrance. The true responses must deal with rage. For where ever there is rage, there is destruction. Where ever there is rage, there is some means for great destruction. Even if there were no guns, there are devices, automobiles and others, that would enable great destructive force for someone intent on it. The public conversation must move to raising our culture very differently than we are now doing, just as the Hokie community conversation focused on the lost and the living rather than on the aberrant one.
