So seriously, y’all, this is not the kind of thing I had in mind to write about on this blog. I work on a college campus where two weeks ago a man shot his exgirlfriend and himself. Then today, in the area where I grew up, this horrific shooting with 33 people dead.
I just can’t understand. Who the hell are these guys? If you’re so pissed about your life or so unhappy, kill your own damn self and leave the rest of us out of it.
It was actually scarier to see today’s coverage at Virginia Tech than the pictures from UW two weeks ago. Which is completely bizarre because at first we didn’t know the shooter was dead at UW and it happened two blocks from my building when we were sitting in a staff meeting. But the Tech campus is where I grew up. We were there every weekend in the fall for football games. For probably twenty years, my mom has had a parking space for the games that’s across the street from the dorm where the shootings started this morning. Sure it’s naïve, but that’s a safe pace in my mind and memory. I went to computer camp there (yes, geek!). My sister took her SATs in Norris Hall and my cousin’s high school graduation was next door in Burress Hall. There’s a duck pond on campus where I infamously (among my family and friends, anyway) fell in during a high school field trip and lost my favorite white sandals.
My Dad was a Tech alum. He loved that place so much. He's been dead for almost a decade now, and I can count on one hand the days that I'm almost glad he didn't live to see. This is one of them.
I hate hearing people say “I didn’t think it could happen here” and intellectually I know this shit can happen anywhere. But I have a child’s emotional attachment to that place. It CAN happen there, but god damn, it should not.
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