...

I don't know what a blog would say today except something that mentioned the tragic shooting at the Virginia Tech campus, which involved 33 deaths including the suicide of the gunman himself. I haven't seen anything on the news outside of my own internet home page, so I don't know if there is sensationalizing or over-reporting going on of this tragedy, the broadcasting-investigations or perhaps even conspiracy theories being thrown around until more news comes to light. For me, innocent people are dead and their families have lost someone today, their friends innumerable.

Compassion. When I heard of this I asked myself how can I relate to something in Virginia, or a massacre, or even the murder of someone close. Automatically I know I can't. But if I consider that Virginia isn't far from Washington DC where my cousin works, or that Virginia is a southern state in my mind and so is Tennessee, then that means something more to me. Then there is the university campus... what if this happened at a more local university like Stanford, or across the Bay in Berkeley, or at my own uni of SF State, down the road. That brings it home even more, what then, who would I know that would be affected? What in the hell could I do then? Compassion. So then I think of my own life as a teacher, both future and present, and I wonder what parents would think about sending their kids to school tomorrow, perhaps anywhere, let alone in Virginia... the fear of this. In Erfurt, Germany, or Beslan, Russia, or Columbine, Colorado (and these are only the few I can remember), tragedies have occurred in schools involving hostages, fear, and in some cases unbelievable violence and death - in grade schools, not just in universities. I have so many friends and colleagues teaching in schools in many countries. And that's where it hits me.

Compassion for the families is all I can squeeze out when I feel the helplessness I feel now in writing about this, the lack of there being anything I can do except pray and give love as much as possible to the people around me and those alive tomorrow. And hopefully not just tomorrow, but the day after that and every day I can, because though my fading memory of this tragedy is inevitable it won't fade for people just like me who, unlike me, lost someone they loved today in senseless violence and ugly death. Prayer and compassion are all I can speak about on a day like this.