[Dialogue] {Spam?} Blacksburg/Baghdad

Mon Apr 23 21:09:18 EDT 2007

I struggled all last week with what happened at Virginia Tech. My mind 
cannot conceive of what would have been going on inside of someone that 
would a person to do what this man did to 32 other students and faculty.
I watched sadly as the news unfolded the news conferences and the prayer vigil later that night

I got an email that Dick had posted from John Shelby Spong where suggested that the reason that 
all these people died was that they were at the wrong place at the wrong 
time. That upset me - it sounds too much like fatalism. Which means whatever 
will be, will be. I agree with Margaret.s response . I can't get a lot of comfort in that kind of thinking.

At some point I switched channels and there was Franklin Graham. He was telling that he had arrived with his "response team" of 20 :chaplains" telling us. I shutter to think what they said to the VT students. Then Franklin proclaimed 
that Satan was the cause of it all. I spent the spring and sand part of the summer(I spent July in Chicago)  of 1971 
one with Franklin. He fell in love with a good find of mine and eventually married her. He didn't sound much like the person I remember. He seems to have fallen into the judgmental style of his father Billy. What he 
said bothered me too. His statement sure doesn't square with my  
understanding of free will. As we know this means that we all get to make choices in 
life. When we make them we get to stand accountable for them. Blaming it on 
Satan just doesn't work. It just a cop out. 

I believe that what set this guy off was that there was something missing in 
his Life. To talk about that theologically is to say that he was a sinner.Our old
hero Paul Tillich told us that sin is about being separated. Separated from 
oneself. Separated from others. Separated from the ground of our being. He 
goes on to say that it is only when we come to the point of understanding what is causing 
that separation or our sinfulness,can we get to the point that we know that 
we have already been forgiveness. Only on the other side of accepting that 
forgiveness we experience the grace that comes from God.

It seems to that when someone is in such a state that he able to commit such 
a horrendous crime is when someone is unable to bridge whatever is 
separating them from life itself. That they are unable to receive 
forgiveness or give forgiveness to others. 

That kind of lucidity about he way life is what moves towards wholeness

The other thing that has loomed in my mind was about the utter bankruptcy our political system is so paralized by the influence of big business and the NRA relative to gun control. I& was shocked to learn recently that the NRA is a for-profit corporation. The more the oppose gun control the more members they attack the more money they to promote their misbegotten interpretation of the 2nd, so on and so on, The corps are another matter. They gave enough to our dimwitted president to get him to sign a law in ''05 that indemnifies gun manufactures and dealers from criminal or civil prosecution. No other industry is so blessed.

Meanwhile, American and Iraqis are dying because dimwit can't seem to afford them the same protection he has provided to unwanted soon to be dead embryonic stem cells. 

Maybe if we have succeeded in teaching the world what we figured out the Social Processes and about Profound Humaness and actually launched a New Social Vehicle riding on the undercarriage of a New Religious Mode the world would be a better place by now. Alas.......

David Walters

Living in LA (lower Alabama) tryin to teach some folks in my commutnity the methods I learned working with ICA 

 . 

David Walters 

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: W. J. 
  To: oe at wedgeblade.net ; dialogue at wedgeblade.net 
  Sent: Monday, April 23, 2007 2:45 PM
  Subject: [Dialogue] {Spam?} Blacksburg/Baghdad

This is a rant.

One week after the massacre at Virginia Tech, I’m still feeling oddly unsettled and still angry. 

Blacksburg was a happy place to visit when I was growing up. My uncle made violins and taught Physics at Tech, and my aunt would pass out wooden recorders so we could play orchestra with my violin-playing cousins upstairs in their big old house. We’d break up laughing at the missed notes. What a wonderful gang of relatives! I miss them, especially those to whom we’ve had to say a final good-bye. And I miss the sense of uncomplicated fun we shared and the unquestioned safety of our insularity, with the Korean War a
 long way off.

I can tell you that Blacksburg is remote. Still remote, despite the influx of a huge, diverse student population going for that prized Tech degree. A long way from the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and Baghdad, where the Pentagon will pay your one-way ticket and ship you back in a box. Uncle Sam wants you if you can’t get into Virginia Tech.

And there are thousands of Blacksburgs and millions of classrooms where our kids and their kids still go to school in unquestioned safety and insularity. With wooden doors and old-fashioned doorknobs, and without automatic electronic lockdown systems and Kevlar vests. In our hearts this is still Mayberry, and if there are any cops around they’re more like Andy Griffith than Clint Eastwood. 

But the universe has changed. And I’ve grown up emotionally as well as physically. But I’m not happy with the outcomes.

And I can tell you that this Mr. Cho who bought the guns and pulled the trigger and shot 175 rounds into defenseless kids is not the last shooter. Not the single exception to our safe universe by any stretch of our collective imagination.

This Mr. Cho was inside the system. He was one of us. He had unrestricted access to our nation’s unsecured classrooms. He easily evaded our lax state gun control laws and federal laws prohibiting sale of lethal weapons to those who’ve been adjudged a danger to themselves or to others.

So we had it coming. And unfortunately there may be thousands of Mr. Cho’s within the system who can get access to the weapons. Maybe we could see it coming, or at least now we can see it coming again.

I’m just numb over Baghdad. So numbed that getting today’s kill figures on the news won’t make much cumulative difference. But Blacksburg? That’s US, baby. Way more all of us than all of them over there.

So what do we do now for all the good people of all the Blacksburgs who aren’t ready for the next one? I mean the students, the English professors, the campus cops, the deans of students, the mental health counselors, the hapless college presidents? Not to mention the relatives of those who get mowed down? And not to mention the thousands of Mr. Cho’s and their incredulous or oblivious roommates and classmates? What do we do now?

I’m thinking: tighter gun control laws, more serious and highly trained law enforcement, greater sensitivity and much greater competence across all education personnel, a dramatically increased budget and scope of practice for mental health professionals, and a new balance between the protecion of confidentiality and mandated followthrough/aftercare for all risk-identified people in the system. And, for the Mr. Cho’s of this world who’ve been repeatedly red-flagged, mandated counseling as a condition of
 progressing to graduation for as long as they’re in the system. 

But that, my friends, would take a lot of green. So far we’ve been building our Blacksburgs on the cheap. With old-fashioned doorknobs. --Wayne Marshall JonesWayne Marshall Jones lives in San Francisco where he ponders the future and gives thanks for all who gave us this moment. His journey with EI/ICA/O:E beganin 1958, when at age 18 he was first impacted by the Christian Faith and Life Community of Austin, TX.  

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