Sitting at work today I watched the drama at Virginia Tech unfold on the internet, then on TV in the customer waiting area. There are no words to express the sadness we all felt as the death toll crept higher and higher. When things like this happen, you can't help but feel for the families who don't know whether they'll ever speak to their children, boyfriends, girlfriends, wives, husbands, fathers, mothers or friends ever again.
Virginia Tech's President just released a figure of 33 dead at a press conference. 33 families who have lost someone near and dear to them. We may never know why people snap and do things like this, but I dare say it doesn't matter; what matters is that they do. We will never be able to stop these things through any amount of counseling, intervention, or by any other means. When someone is going to snap, they will. We can only hope to minimize the number and severity of these types of attacks, though even one is too many.
What we can do without fail is to love one another as if today is the last day we'll see each other. In times where senseless killings like this occur, it may well be. Cherish the ones you have, let go of grudges, vendettas, and hate. Life is fleeting and is far too short to risk losing the opportunity to love.
In the aftermath of this tragedy, as the media scrambles to assign blame to anyone and everyone except the shooter, and to posit the endless stream of what-ifs, remember that what really matters is that so many people are gone, cut down before their time. So many lives wasted, loves destroyed, and families who now will never come to be.
Of course we must act to determine what happened and if something could have been done. To deny that would be ignorant. But we mustn't let the media-fueled quest for blame to become the end all of this. We must mourn the fallen and take the opportunity of their loss to remind us to treasure what, and who, we still have.
