WHY?

“You have vandalized my heart, raped my soul, and torched my conscience.”

I have been caught up in the media blitz of the Virginia Tech Massacre for the last five days. I have seen the videos and pictures of this young man that people describe as a loner with empty eyes. I have read about his family. I have read about his victims. I have read about the gun.

My brain is racing to find an answer to of course the unanswerable question: Why?

I am a vegetarian. I did not even have the heart to kill a wasp that was living in my bathroom for several days.

Why?

I am the girl who, when her mother read her the story of the Little Red Hen, I said it was mean for her to not share her food with the other barnyard animals, even though they hadn’t helped her thresh the wheat and all of that.

Why? How could he do this?

I’ve spent a lot of time as a loner. In darker times, I’ve been violent to myself.

How? Why?

My first reaction is to blame the guns.







Guns seem to be a leading killer of folks in that 17-24 age bracket. They just make things too easy.

On farther thought, my reaction is to blame social isolation. We all sit staring at our computer monitors. We don’t go to the bank; we go to the ATM. We can easily go all day without ever having to speak to another person face to face. We live in gated communities. We close our doors. We lock them. We don’t talk to strangers.

A quote from one of my favorite articles written on the issue:

“Forty year old Joyce Vincent had been lying dead in her London apartment for two straight years before the badly decomposed body was discovered by her landlord in April 2006. The story, quietly tucked away in British newspapers, profoundly upset readers around the world who saw her isolation as a failing of modern communities. As one outraged blogger put it, “Two years. She lay there. Alone, dead, unnoticed, and unmissed. How is it possible that in a city of about seven million, not one person noticed that a neighbor, sister, cousin or friend was missing?””
Full article is here:

http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/69/Loneliness_and_Technology.html

But still, this doesn’t answer it. There is no real answer. The situation still brings me to me knees. It makes me sick to my stomach. It makes my brain hurt.

All I know is that social isolation and guns are two things I will forever be fighting against.