Vain Imagining

Now, the terrible mass-shootiong at Va Tech is sliding into the latest media fixation in an endless series of voyeuristic entrancements. In this case, there is endless pondering and questioning about how this could happen and what might prevent it. Flip Wilson would have had a more accurate and succinct summation: The devil made him do it.

As long as human history demonstrates them, some people seem unable to come to grips with a few simple things: 1) We're all going to die, it's only a question of how painfully. Thousands of Americans die every day in a manner more protracted and painful than being shot. 2) People do destructive and deadly things. They always have. They always will.

Our media seems determined to distract us from coming to grips with these basic facts. Now, the endless intervies with Va. Tech students, faculty, and officials unsparingly prod about anything that might have been detected that might have been a tip-off that this guy was "a nut," to put it curtly. I know that media people must fill the air and work to be interesting to the listener. But the questioning, as always, gets tedious. This morning, I heard one of these probing interviews of a student who had lived in the dorm room next to Mr. Hui, the gunman. Coming back from a break, the interviewer in introducing the next questions says, "I can't imagine what it must have been like for you al that time, living right next door to him!" Oh, my God! When I think about t, I might have been in an elevator or something with a killer!

Anyway, he wasn't "a nut." He was unsatisfied with life. He and millions of others. Which ones will go off like this? Which ones will just kill themselves? Which ones will submerge themselves in french fries or ice cream? And, which ones will just deal with it? We dom't know. And, we can't tie down society with laws and rule hoping to stop the sort of thing THAT WILL NEVER BE STOPPED, IN THIS LIFE!

What we should learn, more than how to regulate ordinary life, is how to recognize isolated and lonely people and befriend them, instead of spurning them. THAT"S what we're here for. Americans have been marinated in the idea that we are here to perfect the laws and rules OVER society, regardless of personal responsibility. WRONG! You don't have to be a star, or an authority. It's your job to be the ost loving individual IN a society that you can be.

Larry