April 18, 2007--Shit Happens

How could such a thing happen on, of all places, a college campus? It is unfathomable.

The media, criminologists, clergy, the person with whom I just had morning coffee are all desperately attempting to understand how something like this could have occurred. And of course, equally important and understandable, struggling to think what might have been done to prevent the massacre—a better university alert system, more campus security, gun control, preemptively treating or incarcerating the murderer.

Nothing seems to make sense. We have the Second Amendment which guarantees our “right” to bear arms. We have philosophers and anthropologists and psychologists and molecular biologists who have for centuries attempted to understand the nature of Human Nature—do we have immutable capacities which were essential to survival during prehistoric times but in the modern era are no longer required and are thus dangerous. Etcetera.

And for others there is religion which tells us that in spite of Virginia Tech and even more horrific events we are still fortunate to be blessed and protected by a “compassionate and loving God.” To explain human atrocities such as this there is also the Devil and he is in the business of perpetrating Evil. No matter, there is no contradiction to those who believe that their all-powerful God appears to be powerless in this world in the face of the Devil’s agenda. Though many believers struggle with this as well.

We’ve heard all of this during the past three painful days. What we haven’t heard may be closer to the explanation, to the “truth”: Shit just happens. All the time.

It may be that since we instinctively understand that almost all things are fundamentally, astonishingly unfair—think from where you and I are perched in the world what it means to be living in Darfur—for these reasons we are desperate to find rational or supernatural explanations for the seemingly capricious ways in which life’s cards are dealt and how our days unfold.

There is no true way to make sense of a world in which one child is afflicted with cancer or another does not have access to potable water while still another is touched with mathematical or musical genius.

Just at the moment that they were having the memorial service at Virginia Tech I was at an unrelated event at New York University. While thousands of students in Blacksburg, VA assembled to mourn, a few hundred other college students in New York City bobbed to the beat of a jazz band. As if nothing had happened 300 miles to their south? For some, perhaps. From most I sensed that they too grieved but that they also understood that since who-knows-what this is what we have and we have to do the best we can.

As Kurt Vonnegut was famous for saying, “So it goes.”