There was a shooting on my school's campus a few years ago...

[Wetzelbill]

I'll post this here too for my Lounge friends. :) -WB

From my blog:

I have purposely avoided the news.

For me, it doesn’t feel right reading or watching all of the coverage of a school shooting. I do know that on the Virginia Tech campus, in Blacksburg, a young man went on a shooting rampage that took the lives of over thirty people, and then himself.

I do know that he was studying writing.

But the sadness of it all, the pain, the questions… I try to spare myself of all of those as much as possible. It may sound selfish, in fact, I’m sure it is, however incidents this horrific devastate me. They make me lose faith in this world. That’s something I don’t want to do.

Sometimes all I have is faith.

Somewhere in me I believe the world is still good. That us humans deserve righteousness. That somewhere inside us and in our nature we have enough integrity and compassion to warrant peace, love and understanding.

Over four years ago, one October morning, I woke up to go to a class on American Indian Literature. I jolted from slumber about 5 minutes before my alarm was set to go off. I stretched out in bed, feeling uneasy, moving and thinking as if I were in slow motion.

Something didn’t feel right.

I took the bus to class, something seemed off. The whole ride was weird. When I arrived on campus, we were a few minutes later than usual, so I knew I would have to hurry to class and was going over the readings in my mind.

Campus was eerie. It just wasn’t right. In my head, I swear I thought: “Wow, it’s almost like there was a shooting or something.”

There was.

I didn’t find out the details until later, when I was able to get to a computer and read the news, but that morning, about an hour before I was on campus, there was a shooting. It actually was in the nursing college, which was off the main campus, but the point is a shooting occurred at the University of Arizona.

That morning, Robert Flores, a former Gulf War Vet and a failing nursing student, walked into an instructor’s office and shot her to death. He then went into a nursing classroom and shot to death two more female instructors before he killed himself.

These murders occurred at almost the exact time that I woke up.

I always wondered why I woke up before my alarm. Why did I have that feeling? I wasn’t truly connected to any of this. It bothers me to this day just thinking about it. Those poor women, murdered like that. Professors who dedicated their lives to teaching and healing others. For some reason, I woke from sleep with a funny feeling while they were being murdered.

This is the first time I have ever written about it.

The first time I ever truly explained it to anyone.

I don’t know what to make of it, if there is anything to it at all. It seems so trivial. Oh, a funny feeling, wow. Hey Bill, guess what? People were killed. You simply had a “funny feeling.” Get over it.

But the questions linger.

The emptiness.

It’s as if I am supposed to do something with it. Write about it. Explore it. I don’t know. Typically I ignore it.

Because there are events that trigger sadness within me. I spend most of my life reading the news. From various sources. I have recently stopped reading as much as I used to do. I read literary works instead, the news is way too depressing.

In the last few days over two hundred people in Iraq have been killed in explosions. You know, my cousin is over there. I don’t even like thinking about that stuff anymore. It seems like somebody is always dying. Somebody is always hurting. Somebody is always not getting adequate medical care, dying from disease, wasting away from drugs, alcohol or something else. There are people who are wrongfully jailed. Others who are wrongfully free. There are wars, genocides, infanticides and deicides. There is racism, sexism, homophobia and all kinds of xenophobia.

It’s pervasive.

You know, Tom Brokaw says we have seen a “coarsening” in our culture. I don’t know for sure, but I’m beginning to think we have always been pretty fucked up. That none of this is new. It’s just that we every now and then pay attention to the most obvious glimpses of a nasty reality.

I hate seeing it anymore. I just want to move on. Be normal. Find love. Happiness. Be gleefully ignorant.

But I guess that’s not possible. Being curious is a curse. The more you find out the more you become saddened. The pain permeates throughout your soul. I wish I didn’t know that women are being murdered in Juarez, Mexico and nobody seems to give a fuck about it. I wish I didn’t know that young women are being forced into working and having abortions in the Marianas Islands, a U.S. territory, and that elements of our government support that. I wish I didn’t know that the United States has a higher rate of imprisonment than Communist China. I wish I didn’t know that on my home reservation in Montana people are getting killed and the law enforcement situation is such that not much is being done about it all.

But I do.

And it seems we all know similar things. We all have to deal with this shit. Sometimes we even create, participate and cultivate it. We become blind and numb. We walk by this stuff every day, turn the other way.

It’s a defense mechanism. Ignore the horror and try to move on and live our lives.

I hate to say it. But we can’t. It’s not easy, but nothing ever is.

You know, in legendary Japanese film director, Akira Kurosawa’s film: “Ran” the character Kyoami says: “Man is born crying. When he has cried enough, he dies.” And he goes on to ask if there were any Gods, and why were they so cruel, he wonders why they would crush us like ants. And another character talks about how it’s men who “prefer sorrow over joy… choose suffering over peace.” He suggests that it is God who looks down at us and sees all the damage man has done, and then weeps.

I wonder if this is true? Do we make God weep? In all our arrogance and all our failings are we the cause of all of our own pain and sorrow? I would hope we deserve better. That in some way we can find a way to create our own happiness. To create peace and love.

To take all the pain in this world away.

And in “Ran” another character named Hidetora replies to all of these questions: “I am lost.” Then Kyoami retorts: “Such is the human condition.”

I hope with all my heart that someday we will all be found.

[Ptah]

1. I am praying for your cousin

:patriot:

And, yes, Tucson lost some of her soul that day.

I hope to meet you in real life sometime, Wetzelbill

[Wetzelbill]

2. don't we ride the same bus?

It seems weird that we haven't met. I am relatively reclusive I guess. :)

Thanks for the prayers. Much appreciated.

[Ptah]

3. .

[marzipanni]

4. It would be interesting to be an anthropologist

and go around the world and live with people in different societies, including "primitive"cultures.
What makes a society, small or large, healthy both physically and psychologically?
We in our money driven world have lost a lot of the sense of community that human beings have made for themselves in the past. A "coarsening" of the culture, what's the antonym for coarse? Refined, soft. What if, instead of only women becoming "liberated" and taking jobs as men had, men had become liberated at the same time and became less focused on work and more focused on their children, homes, and communities. What if, instead of a mother and father spending so much time working to support the family monetarily, it still took no more than 40-60 hours of median pay work to support a family decently, and the parents could decide if both would have part-time jobs or one would have a full time job, and single parents wouldn't be trying to keep up with two-wage earning families in their ability to support their family.
I don't think women with children should be "stuck at home", not having some satisfying work outside of the home, but I think men and women should have more opportunities to be with their children and share activities with other families. People would have more time and energy for volunteer work. (Also cats and dogs would be adopted more if houses weren't empty all day!)
Why did we have to make life more hectic and pressurized? We could have made it less so.
(I have to go out now, so if you reply to this I'll see it later.)