It's been two days since a disturbed 23-year old student gunned down 32 people in Virginia Tech then shot himself. While I know that it is unimaginably more painful to those who lost someone to this tragedy or to the survivors, I am greatly disturbed not just as someone who would be because of the violence, but because I work in a university setting. I couldn't help but imagine how desperate those people must have been while the gunman turned their classrooms into cages where he both methodically and randomly shot people down. A friend and I were talking about it the day after and she said she couldn't concentrate while she was teaching because she would look at every passer by.
It's even more disturbing because of how often it has happened here in the US. In other societies, massacres happen because of cultural, political and religious divisions. However, massacres of this kind in the US are carried out by individuals who feel that they are at war with the rest of society. I mean, the US is a great country because of its diversity and mixed cultures, but is the price of greatness the isolation that some people feel? They feel so isolated that they do not consider the lives of others or of themselves valuable. I wish I understood what kind of environment these sociopaths could have grown up in that turned them into what they are, but since I don't, all I can hope for is that at least one person makes a difference in their lives that would make them believe that they are not alone.
