oh, lord...

Looking up information for something unrelated (trying to get a list of all the damn product recalls - they're now recalling Listerine, folks, for bacterial contamination - in the past year, to see if this had just been an unusually bad several months)

and I ran across this.

Oh, holy crap. 22 people (including the shooter*) shot dead in Virginia. At Va Tech.

These kinds of stories always make me shocked and sad. I'm sure that's the whole proximity thing - being a prof, having spent pretty much my entire life on college campuses.

(*I was originally going to say there "well, 21 PEOPLE and the shooter" but decided that this is the wrong place, wrong time for that kind of snark)

Part of it is, you learn how much a community - really, in some cases, a family, a college campus becomes. When someone associated with your department dies, it is like having a family member die (In some cases, maybe it's the weird uncle or that cranky great-grandmother who was good at alienating people, but it is still like having someone in your family die). It's a sad and terrible thing....to go back to work and have that gap there, that gaping emptiness, reminding you the person is gone.

Part of it also, I am sure, is sort of a little frisson - "there but for the grace of God go I" - that this kind of incident can (and has) happened many places, and it's hard to predict who will lose it, who will start doing the thing no sane person would do. The thought that someday I could be gunned down like that - or students in my class could, while I had to watch (which I think would be worse). It's horrifying.

I'm not totally untouched by campus craziness. When I was in graduate school, there was a student who failed (for the third time) a chem class. He went nuts - he was roaming the halls of the building where my dad had his office, saying, "I'll ****ing kill him!" referring to the chem prof. He ended it by putting his fist through the plate glass cover on the sign listing people's names and their offices. He was escorted off by Security, but not before issuing several scary threats about the fate of the building and the people (including my father) therein.

He was basically issued a restraining order - required to stay a certain distance from campus. (but, inexplicably, he was allowed to re-enroll a couple years later. I never heard if he actually finished but at least it was without incident).

I also had a student blow up at me in my office a few years ago. He became very angry, very red in the face, yelling, accused me of having a homework assignment over something I had not taught in class and that was somehow cheating him because I didn't "tell" him that (???? - it said right on the assignment, "Use your textbook to assist you because I didn't have time to cover all of this"). I finally managed to steer him out the door and he stomped off but it was a frightening ten minutes or so.

Fearfully, it occurred to me, "There probably should be some kind of a paper trail on this so at the very least people aren't shaking their heads on the 6:00 news, going, "But he was so quiet! I'd never have expected this of him!" I called and e-mailed his advisor (paper trail, remember...I almost even wrote a note saying, "If I am found murdered, it was probably "Dale" who did it"). The advisor kind of chuckled (not in a dismissive way) and said, "Oh, you have the 'pleasure' of having "Dale" in your class." He went on to reassure me that "he's never been violent" (um, somehow, not very comforting) and that the guy usually "pulled it out enough to make a D by the end of the term."

Well, I'm still here, so Dale didn't come back and knife me or anything. But he did fail the class...I think he actually failed out that term.

It's scary sometimes being a prof - because of confidentiality rules we do not learn about students who may have anger issues or problems with stability. We never know if someone's going to be set off by something. Sometimes you realize that in a certain class you have to kind of walk on eggshells, and that sometimes you need to be sure your office door is wide, wide open (and you are between it and the student you are talking to, just in case).

(And, before you remind me - yes, I know of the other incidents, the law firms and businesses where employees have been killed. It's not just colleges. But there's something frightening, no matter where it is, to think of going to work where you don't plan on being in the line of fire - where you're filing reports or placing orders or writing briefs or preparing for class - and suddenly have violence burst into the equation)

But if someone comes to school with a gun - unless other people on campus, people who are the 'good guys' have them - it's game over. (And even then, it's still sometimes game over.)

I do live in a concealed-carry state, and I am quite sure several of my students have guns - probably locked up in their cars (I don't know if there's a regulation against carrying into a campus building but I bet there is). I strongly suspect that if a nutbag came onto campus with the intention of taking out students and profs, the concealed-carry guys would (a) get their guns if at all possible and (b) do whatever they could to protect the rest of us. (A little reassuring, but still not that reassuring - I'd rather the crazies be kept off campus in the first place).

Another reaction I have is sadness - all of those lives snuffed out for nothing. Probably by someone with some kind of beef against the school - or against the world - that some time and counseling would work out. (That's what gets me - in these incidents and also in a lot of suicides - it's one of those hair-trigger things, where if the person STOPPED and THOUGHT and PUT THINGS ASIDE for a day, they might be less inclined to do it and more inclined to get help.)

(Apparently the shooter killed himself...so maybe it's a Columbine type thing of someone who is so screwed up they don't know what to do. But...she says cynically but not unsympathetically**...if he wanted to die why didn't he just blow HIMSELF away and leave everyone else alone)

(**and lest you accuse me of being heartless: I have lost friends and a relative to suicide. But at least they had the decency to only take their own lives.)

I don't know...I have a very hard time understanding this. I'm the kind of person who, when I get angry, I mean REALLY angry, I get up from whereever I'm sitting and say through clenched teeth, "I need to go for a walk." And I walk until I feel better. Or if I'm really really pissed, I buy cheap dishes at the Goodwill and go out into my backyard and break them or throw rocks at them until my anger dissipates. I can't understand the desire to maim or kill fellow human beings SIMPLY BECAUSE YOU ARE ANGRY. (Self-defense, yes, I understand. War situation, yes, I understand. But not some mook whose life sucks and who listens to a lot of "dark" music and thinks it's a cool way to make a "statement.")

Anyway. My heart goes out the the folks at Virginia Tech. They're in my prayers even though I don't know any of their names. What a horrible thing it would be to be the parent of a kid going to school there...the not knowing, the hope that you'd show up on campus and your kid would be standing there scared but unhurt and the fear that you'd show up and they wouldn't be...

I think for me there's also the feeling of innocence shattered. Oh, I know, colleges are not necessarily safe places - there was one school my father dissuaded me from even applying to because of where it was located in the city it was located in - but on my fairly rural campus, it's easy to have the belief that nothing very bad can happen here, that it's basically a refuge from the outside world, that it's a place where most of the people are caring and civil or at least not dangerous lunatics...and to see a pretty old brick campus, that looks like it has a setting not unlike my school, torn apart because of one person's evil...it's just horrifying.

Whenever I say the Lord's Prayer, I always pause a bit on the line, "...and deliver us from evil." It's funny...a lot of commentators I read remind me that the evil we suffer often comes from within, from us doing evil to ourselves. But when I say, "...and deliver us from evil" I visualize the Big External Things - for years, I had a mental image of the planes hitting the Towers. But now, I think, for at least a while I may have the image of a black-gloved man walking onto a sunny campus, guns in hand.

And all you can do, really, in a crazy world sometimes, is to pray to be delivered from evil.