[Oe List ...] {Spam?} Blacksburg/Baghdad

Mon Apr 23 18:26:08 EDT 2007

Well said Marshall

Jonathan B
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: W. J. 
  To: oe at wedgeblade.net ; dialogue at wedgeblade.net 
  Sent: Tuesday, April 24, 2007 7:15 AM
  Subject: [Oe List ...] {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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