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April 18, 2007
Praying for Hokie Nation
I know I'm not alone in expressing my deepest sympathies to all the friends and families of the victims of Monday's massacre at Virginia Tech University. I first found out about the shootings at around 2 o'clock when I happened to check a news website (yes, I was doing real work all day to that point... well, except for lunch, but you get the idea), and was absolutely shocked to hear about what had happened down in Blacksburg. My heart goes out to all those people who have been affected and who have had their lives shattered by this evil act. I felt called on Monday night to send a note of support to one of the Christian student groups down at Va Tech, so my google searching led me to the website of Graduate Christian Fellowship at Virginia Tech. I emailed one of the leaders of the group, Dustin, and told him that all of us up here at Penn State Christian Grads were praying for them, and that the entire Christian community on campus at VT and in and around Blacksburg would be able to be a powerful light in this time of darkness. He replied shortly thereafter, thanking me for the encouragement, and letting me know that everyone in their group was safe. In the course of other correspondence that PSCG members have had with him, he gave us the names of several GCF members to pray for, who were connected in some way to the victims and/or the shooter. Along with another PSCG member named David, who knew a Penn State alum who was killed in the shooting, I helped start a group on Facebook yesterday afternoon called "Christians Supporting Virginia Tech," to help show our support for them. Currently there are about a hundred people from around the country who have joined so far, and there are more joining all the time.
The Virginia Tech massacre really struck a chord with a lot of people at Penn State, because PSU/State College and VT/Blacksburg are really not all that different -- large, public universities in small, friendly and safe Appalachian cities -- and there's really nothing that's preventing a similar situation from happening here. (Again, rather. Back in 1996 here at Penn State, a female ROTC student dressed in camo gear and facepaint, hid in the bushes along Pattee Mall, and shot four people, killing one, before another student saw what was happening and tackled the shooter, but not without suffering some knife cuts from her on his arm.) There is a rapidly-growing movement amongst Penn State students to wear orange & maroon this weekend for the Blue-White Game, Penn State football's annual spring scrimmage, and another group of 800 students will be forming a huge blue & white human "VT" amidst the sea of orange and maroon, instead of the traditional "S" that is visible in the student section at home football games. Tomorrow at Pasquerilla Spiritual Center there will be time for prayer and meditation from 10am-5pm, along with a memorial service at noon for the victims at Virginia Tech. There'll be a banner there and at the HUB that people can sign too, which will then be sent to VT. I can tell the outpouring of support from all across the nation, including here at Penn State, is tremendous. It's moving to see it all, and I don't even have a direct connection to Virginia Tech at all. Right now, everybody's a Hokie.
I know the knee-jerk reaction by many has been to call for more gun control, but I would tend to argue that the situation might not have gotten as far as it did had there not been as much gun control -- someone carrying a weapon might potentially have been able to stop the shooter, but there's no way of knowing that for sure. In a world that's fallen and corrupted by sin, there's really nothing that can be done to prevent something like this from happening just about anywhere, at least not without turning campuses or communities into veritable prisons, which I vehemently oppose. There are also many who have been calling for the ouster of the President of Virginia Tech and the campus chief of police, but I think that's ridiculous. Unless I'm given solid evidence to believe otherwise, I believe the school administrators and the police when they say they were acting on the best information they had, when they chose not to lock down the entire campus after the first shooting at the residence hall. Seriously, they had no reason to think the incident was going to go any further than the apparent domestic violence dispute, even though two people were shot to death during it. Unfortunately, they couldn't have been more wrong. While there were perhaps mistakes made along the way, from how the school handled the shooter's mental health situation and the criminal complaints against him, I don't think that there's any need to blame anyone in this incident except for the shooter. He's the one who committed this atrocity. He's the one who had been planning it for weeks. He's the one who chose to taunt the world from the grave by sending his "multi-media manifesto" to NBC, knowing that they would of course dutifully air it. He's the one who has/is/will be held accountable for this by God at the judgement seat of Heaven. Instead of trying to find a scapegoat, people should be focusing on the many heroes in this situation, remembering the fallen and praying for those who knew them.
In happier news, my friend Ryan Hall was on "Jeopardy!" on Monday night. Kerrie, Ben, Julian & I went over to Ryan & Sarah's place to have some pizza and watch the show. The categories were absolutely brutal, though. They were seriously some of the hardest categories/questions ("answers") that I've seen in some time on that show. I mean, usually there's at least one insane category every episode, but there were a bunch this time. Anyway, Ryan did well considering they just weren't his categories, but he finished in 3rd place. It was awesome seeing him on the show, though! And at least he got the Chesapeake Bay question, since he's originally from Virginia and everything. :-) It's too bad he won't ever be able to be on the show again, as they don't ever let you come back unless they invite you for the Tournament of Champions or something. But at least the third place prize is significantly better than what it used to be (the Jeopardy board game), hehe.
Last night Kerrie, Stephanie, Caleb, John, Ruth & I went over to Tracy's place to celebrate her birthday with a game night. And what better way to celebrate a birthday than to play a couple games of Bible Trivia (and a couple rounds of Taboo)! The "easy/children's" questions really were ridiculously easy (for us, anyway), we didn't miss a single one. 
So then we moved up to the "difficult/adult" questions, and those were a definite step up for the most part (going from questions like "Who baptized Jesus?" and "Spell Matthew" to "Who was the wife of governor Felix?", "Who was the first woman raped in the Bible?" and "Who cured Namaan of leprosy?" The Bible really has a ton of information to draw on for trivia, hehe. Anyway, it was a really fun evening!
I finally got the "verobs" code working today that's been vexing me for over a week. And, like most debugging problems, it was something ridiculously simple. Sigh. But at least it works now. And now I must continue to make progress on chapter 2 of my thesis, while running that code and other ensuing codes to plot all these crazy statistics.
Continue to pray for Virginia Tech. We are all Hokies.
Posted by Jared at April 18, 2007 11:14 PM
Comments
A commander in the middle east recently commented on the flags at his base being put at half mass after the VT shootings saying something to the effect `We put the flags at half mass after the VT shootings. Where are the half mass flags for the fallen soldiers in the middle east.`
Four things: I hate the `shock` chasers. The ones who run out and start yelling about their favorite issue (gun control, violent video games and movies) and using this kind of event to play off they sympathies of the people (these being people on the left and right).
This is the 4th major college shooting in about 50 years. Not so bad when you think of the hundreds of thousands of people who are in college every year.
People shouldn`t blame the college prez or the cheif of security. The VT campus has what, near 30,000 people going to it. The logisitics of trying to shut down a campus of that size would be akin to shutting down a city of over 30,000 people. Impossible. Even if they had e-mailed the entire student body, put the word out on college radio, and local TV you STILL would have had people walking around ignoring it or never having heard it. Plus, think of how it would look if the college had shut down and it was nothing? Do you shut down every time you think theres a risk? Its a no win situation for the campus and a tough one to wrap your head around.
Lastly, the Asian backlash. Appearently the American media is looking at this guy as a `Korean.` As an outsider. From what I`ve read the kid had lived in the US for the vast majority of his life. He was as American as the rest. Looking at his race, or what people have been really looking for his `outsiderness`, we`re missing the issue. He was a disturbed individual with a history of problems. I don`t care what he looks like, or if now Korean or Asian communities are feeling guilt for it (seriously, there is appearently a lot of guilt in Korean communities in the US over this). He was one of us all, and we should all feel bad because we failed to notice him or his problems until it was too late.
Posted by: Joshua at April 24, 2007 08:35 PM
Well, I can recount several occasions that the flags were lowered to half-mast following the death of soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan. Usually that's been by decree of individual states, though, and not the federal government.
While I don't think the death of American soldiers is necessarily any less tragic than the people at Va Tech, I think it's somewhat different because of the shock that comes with those events. When you're in the military in a war zone, it's not exactly out of the ordinary for soldiers to be killed. At a "safe" college campus, however (and one on which guns had been banned), when several people die in a single shooting, people are really shocked by it. Again, not that it's any more or less tragic, just that it's more unexpected.
I basically agree with the rest of what you said there, Josh. All good points.
Posted by: Jared at April 26, 2007 12:20 AM