One year ago, my community suffered the a terrible tragedy. Our sense of safety and of peace was taken violently from us and things will never be quite the same.
A lot of people have come to terms with what happened and have move on. I’m one of them for the most part. Still, every now and then, for no real reason at all, the weight of what happened just hits me and I have to cry. Thirty three lives lost so senselessly, so suddenly, so close to home.
I was one building away that morning, huddled in the back rooms of Randolph Hall, refreshing CNN.com on my laptop, trying to find out what was happening. I remember that at first the news kept announcing that only two or three people had been killed. Then the news announced that police had the shooter in custody. I still don’t know where they got that idea. Then they announced that they had been wrong and that there had been over 20 confirmed fatalities. None of us believed it. We thought that they were wrong again, that they mistook a count of casualties for fatalities. I wish they had.
I also wish that people would keep in mind the pain of Seung-Hui Cho’s family. They must have suffered more than any of the families in the past year having lost their son and had to live with the knowledge of what he did. According to the Washington Post, they’ve been forced into seclusion. Their shades are always drawn, their relatives in Korea haven’t heard from them since last year. They have been forced to move around, dodging the media. Seung-Hui Cho committed a terrible crime; his family did not. Dear God, please let them find peace.
Classes are canceled today. I think it’s the right thing to do. However, from what I’ve heard, the university plans to cancel classes on April 16 each year for the foreseeable future. This does not seem like a good idea. After 4 or 5 years, everyone who was hear that day will have moved on and all that will be left will be students who weren’t here. For most of them, April 16 will be little more than another day off school, like a snow day with nicer weather with little more significance attached.
I’d like to thank everyone for the support, thoughts and prayers that you’ve given my university and my community over the past year. I’d like to thank you for the reading my long, disjointed post. I’d like to thank everyone who was in the thread last year and who offered so much support then.
Maybe you’re right, but after one year, the current freshmen do feel connected. This community isn’t going to forget what happened for a while, I think, and incoming students become a part of that, and feel the pain. I hope it doesn’t become like Labor Day, and the victims are remembered every year.
I’d like to post something here that I also put on Daily Kos:
There is no school today. Even if there were, no one would expect us to accomplish anything. We are all affected; some might not acknowledge it, others may cope with it in their own ways, but even those of us who had only spent a day in Blacksburg during March in 2007 are in mourning.
I remember when I found out that it was happening, that people were being killed at school. I went into the cafeteria, since for some reason my AP government class was meeting there. One of my friends asked me if I had heard that two people had been shot at Virginia Tech, and I nodded; I figured he was pulling my leg, since campus homicides are so rare, and I didn’t want to let him finish his joke. A few minutes later, we turned on the TV, and I found out he hadn’t been kidding. We watched the death toll slowly rise, and soon enough one of the administrators turned it off and wouldn’t let us see the coverage. I guess he forgot that we had friends at Virginia Tech, and that (since most of us were seniors) we felt like we were almost in college at that point in the year, and we felt connected to what was happening, albeit in a small way.
At first, I didn’t feel anything; I was more or less numb. Gradually, it came out, but I knew how to deal with it. Like virtually all of my peers, I’d had experience with grief, both personal, as from relatives and pets almost as old as I was, and communal, like the DC sniper and September 11.
I was doing a musical at that time, and we had planned our performances for that Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. (The Friday performance was cancelled.) Our drama department had a tradition called “Circle”, wherein before the production began we would sit in a circle and hold hands, and everyone would take a turn to say something. One of my friends started talking, and before she could really get a word out she started to cry. She asked us to pray for the victims and their families, and even though I don’t believe in God I tried to do something akin to that. A few days later I started crying about it before leaving for school myself.
Nobody at my high school who knew I was planning to go there asked me if my plans had changed, but some adults did. A few times, when I was out with my mother, she mentioned that I was going to Virginia Tech next year, and every time, the person she was talking to asked me if that affected my decision to go to Tech. I always answered that it didn’t; the tragedy there could have happened at any college, and Tech most likely had better security now than any other college precisely because it happened there. I felt no differently about attending Tech in the fall, but not because I had no alternative, since I hadn’t applied anywhere else and couldn’t at this point; I simply didn’t think that April 16th would affect my experience at Tech such that I would want to go to a different college.
Throughout this year, I’ve occasionally thought about what happened that day, both from the memorial service at the beginning of the year, and as a part of mental drift. Every time I think of it, or someone mentions it, I feel a little more connected. I am a part of this university, and though I felt my own pain the day 32 people were murdered, I feel more and more of the grief this community shared then every month. I wasn’t a Hokie then, but I am now.
We remember Ross A. Alameddine.
We remember Christopher James Bishop.
We remember Brian Roy Bluhm.
We remember Ryan Christopher Clark.
We remember Austin Michelle Cloyd.
We remember Jocelyne Couture-Nowak.
We remember Kevin P. Granata.
We remember Matthew Gregory Gwaltney.
We remember Caitlin Millar Hammaren.
We remember Jeremy Michael Herbstritt.
We remember Rachael Elizabeth Hill.
We remember Emily Jane Hilscher.
We remember Jarrett Lee Lane.
We remember Matthew Joseph La Porte.
We remember Henry J. Lee.
We remember Liviu Librescu.
We remember G. V. Loganathan.
We remember Partahi Mamora Halomoan Lumbantoruan.
We remember Lauren Ashley McCain.
We remember Dainel Patrick O’Neil.
We remember Juan Ramon Ortiz-Ortiz.
We remember Minal Hiralal Panchal.
We remember Daniel Alejandro Perez.
We remember Erin Nicole Peterson.
We remember Michael Steven Pohle, Jr.
We remember Julia Kathleen Pryde.
We remember Mary Karen Read.
We remember Reema Joseph Samaha.
We remember Waleed Mohamed Shaalan.
We remember Leslie Geraldine Sherman.
We remember Maxine Shelly Turner.
We remember Nicole Regina White.
“We are Virgina Tech. We will prevail.” - Nikki Giovanni.
I hope and pray that you’re right. As long as each incoming class becomes connected into the community and as long as the community doesn’t forget, the day will not lose its meaning. I just hope that, once those who were here are gone, some of the significance isn’t lost. I feel that it is likely that the university will continue to hold memorials and vigils each year. If it does, it will definitely help to keep April 16 from becoming just another day off.
I can’t believe it’s been a year. I wept when I saw the photographs of all those young lives cut short. My thoughts are with all the victims’ families and friends today.
I don’t know if classes are canceled on December 6th at the École Polytechnique in Montreal, but rest assured that that school massacre has not been forgotten by the students and employees of the school, or by the community at large, or even by the country. You just don’t forget these things, even nearly 20 years later.
I was over at Radford (twenty minutes down the road from Tech for the non-NRVers), finishing up my last semester there. The flood of orange and maroon that was seen in the weeks following was awe inspiring, particular on a campus that rarely sees its own school color, plaid. We were all Hokies, but I’m sad that it took such an event to unite us to Tech. May God bless the souls of those who died that day.