Apr 19, 2007 - 04:05:46 CDT
There are only four times I can remember when I was while watching the news: the flood in Grand Forks, Columbine, 9/11, and now what transpired on Monday. I was only 10 years old when the Columbine shootings happened, but I can still remember watching the news like it was yesterday.On Monday, four days before the eight-year anniversary of Columbine, the worst high school shooting this country has ever seen, a young man decided to make history of his own.
I remember checking BBC News Online to see what was going on in the world, and I saw the headline. I quickly turned on the TV, and was horrified by what was happening. Thirty-one people, the news anchor said.
"Thirty-one college students, students who were just there to learn and to mature and learn how to become adults," I remember thinking. "Thirty-one kids too many." The number was later raised to 33 as the numbers rolled in, but by then I was numb. As a college-bound student myself, I couldn't believe this was happening. "This can't be true," I thought. "This didn't happen. How could this happen again? Why?" I was left with questions, but no answers.
The current numbers are 33 dead (including the gunman, who turned the gun on himself) and 15 being treated in hospitals around the area. This is the worst mass shooting this country has ever seen, and the repercussions are being felt all over the world, including Bismarck, a city 1,500 miles away from the shootings.
During the past seven months, I have written about many things for the Gear page in the Tribune. I've covered video games, movies, even high school football, but all of that seems trivial to what happened on Monday on the campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, better known as Virginia Tech.
"It makes me sick," said Liz Tomek, a junior at Century High School. "It amazes me how one person could care so little about the people around them; that they could kill them. I don't understand how somebody could do it."
"When I saw the headlines on TV, I was on my lunch break out at Mary," said Steve Deisz, a sophomore at the University of Mary. "I couldn't believe that there was another shooting, and then I started thinking about what if it happened out at my school, or at one of the schools where my friends were. I just felt horrible for the victims, their families, and all those affected by it."
I think we have a tendency to think that nothing like this could ever happen to us because, after all, we live in North Dakota. I've had conversations with people in this very country who have asked me if we have electricity up here. But who would have thought this could happen in Virginia? The only thing I knew about Virginia Tech is that it has a pretty good sports program and that it is one of the top engineering schools in the country.
It seemed surreal; it seemed unrealistic. But there I was, watching a student video shot, listening to the 27 gunshots that the footage captured.
Pop. Pop. Pop. It seemed effortless, it seemed natural. All the camera showed was concrete, but the audio said more than images ever could. Twenty-seven shots later, I could hear a police officer screaming to get down, and it cut out. I just sat there; I didn't know what else I could do. Nothing on that video was comforting, and nothing that the news anchor could say was going to make this any easier. I was helpless. All I could do was watch, and hope that number on the bottom of the screen didn't rise anymore.
What happened in Blacksburg, Va., on Monday is not going to be forgotten anytime soon, and it shouldn't. The victims, the families, the school and the country all have been shaken to their core. The work of one man cannot be undone by another, but we have learned from Columbine and 9/11 that when we are brought together, our country can get through anything. Monday showed the bad side of human nature. We owe it to those who died to make sure the good outshines the bad.
(Gear writer Bryan LaBore said in presenting this column that the shootings hit close to home: "I'm four months away from being in that exact same situation as those kids were before today. it just sickens me to my core.")
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