Virginia Tech thoughts ...

What a crazy few days it's been.

With so many things going on in the larger news-cycle - war in Iraq, Bush administration scandal, '08 election hype, the Imus controversy - it was sudden and jarring to hear about something so terrible, so tragic, so out of left-field. But the events at Virginia Tech are just so senseless and disturbing that I think that, for most of us, we're unable to think of much else right now.

One of the first things I wondered was what could have possibly been the killer's motivation. Was he just completely, totally insane? Totally removed from reality? As of right now, no one knows.

How was he so proficient of a killer? Why attack these students who didn't even seem to know who he was? Who was killed in the initial dorm shooting and how did that lead to the larger-scale classroom shooting?

How did this guy get ahold of these guns and so much ammunition?

Why would anyone do this?

Nobody knows right now, but to think of the dozens of people killed in a few senseless hours is just overwhelming. An Israeli holocaust survivor and leading researcher, scores of students just starting out in their academic careers, athletes, scholars. I will say though that I've been extremely impressed with the students of Virginia Tech in the wake of this tragedy - the ones that have been interviewed have been courageous and well-spoken. They are a stark contrast to the killer - who I'm sure many people will want to label as representative of a generation. Within moments of the tragedy, the other students at the university defied any such labels.

At the same time though - this kind of thing really hits home to those of us in the age bracket of the students at Virginia Tech - the same general age bracket that saw their peers at Columbine go through a similar tragedy. It's impossible to really put this latest act of violence into context at this early stage, but it's hard not to look at it in relation to Columbine, which at the time certainly hit those of us in high school like a 500 lb wake up call about the violence that was possible in a school setting.

And I think one of the real things that stays with you when something like that happens and you're relatively young, is that for someone like me, who hadn't really traveled much and hadn't met many people outside of my little sphere of suburban Connecticut, it was definitely jarring to look at the images on the news and say "wait a minute, those people, in Colorado, they might as well be from West Hartford, CT." In essence, it was the realization that that same tragedy could have occured anywhere in suburbia. It could have been our town, our school. Now, I'm sure across the country college students are watching TV and saying "man, that could have been our school, our city, that could have been us."

- I'll be back later with some lighter blog fare, for now though, I'll leave it at that.