The Routine?
From my Diary Tues., April 17, 2007
"There was a poor father on CNN describing how he worred about his beautiful freshman daughter and kept 'doing research' to track her down. She wasn't answering her cell and finally about 7:30 p.m. one of the ambulance drivers broke the news to him and his wife; but they're not allowed to go to the morgue. They had checked all the hopsitals in their research.
"One professor saved his kids by blocking the classroom door, and he was killed. He was 76, a holocaust survivor; his son was interviewed in Israel.
"Some students blocked their own classroom door with furniture and kept the shooter out. He was a So. Korean named Cho who creeped people out with his disurbing writings. Seems he also wrote bomb threats. South Korea is very sorry. So is Paris. My daughter sent me an editorial from Le Monde about 'Prairie Mentality and the American Dream'.... leading to American tragedy."
Well it was sad. The worst mass shooting in U.S. history. A South Korean in Virginia acting out the "prairie mentality."
The day before Virginia Tech, my diary was ruminating on the sorrows of aging; the day after, evaluating a Psalms class I had taught and worrying about a friend in the cardiac ward. We went on with things after Virginia Tech.
But now--December 2012--we've had (to hit the highlights) the Tuscon mall; the Aurora movie theatre; and the Wisconsin Sikh temple. Now tonight on the "News Hour "we got to watch the faces of twenty little first-grade children go by in memoriam and we got to contemplate what an assault rifle wielded by a combat-clad 20-year-old had done to their little six- and seven-year-old bodies.
These scenes have made the country extra-traumatized, at least I hope so. In his speech last night, President Obama said we can't keep tolerating this, we can't just keep accepting these shootings as a routine part of living in the USA. He said, "We have to change."
We shall see.
"There was a poor father on CNN describing how he worred about his beautiful freshman daughter and kept 'doing research' to track her down. She wasn't answering her cell and finally about 7:30 p.m. one of the ambulance drivers broke the news to him and his wife; but they're not allowed to go to the morgue. They had checked all the hopsitals in their research.
"One professor saved his kids by blocking the classroom door, and he was killed. He was 76, a holocaust survivor; his son was interviewed in Israel.
"Some students blocked their own classroom door with furniture and kept the shooter out. He was a So. Korean named Cho who creeped people out with his disurbing writings. Seems he also wrote bomb threats. South Korea is very sorry. So is Paris. My daughter sent me an editorial from Le Monde about 'Prairie Mentality and the American Dream'.... leading to American tragedy."
Well it was sad. The worst mass shooting in U.S. history. A South Korean in Virginia acting out the "prairie mentality."
The day before Virginia Tech, my diary was ruminating on the sorrows of aging; the day after, evaluating a Psalms class I had taught and worrying about a friend in the cardiac ward. We went on with things after Virginia Tech.
But now--December 2012--we've had (to hit the highlights) the Tuscon mall; the Aurora movie theatre; and the Wisconsin Sikh temple. Now tonight on the "News Hour "we got to watch the faces of twenty little first-grade children go by in memoriam and we got to contemplate what an assault rifle wielded by a combat-clad 20-year-old had done to their little six- and seven-year-old bodies.
These scenes have made the country extra-traumatized, at least I hope so. In his speech last night, President Obama said we can't keep tolerating this, we can't just keep accepting these shootings as a routine part of living in the USA. He said, "We have to change."
We shall see.
posted by Pat at 11:08 PM
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