Virginia Tech: Distance, Mourning, and Contact.

I should be writing one or two of the hundred million pages I have to somehow produce between now and May 11, but my mind keeps returning to Virginia Tech. My mom's voice, describing the news feed, plays over and over again. I see myself scanning the quad, my phone to my ear, watching students walking back and forth across the grass and brickpaths in front of Alderman Library. I see my own face contorted, squinting with the effort of imagination, jaw agape. I tried to imagine the unimagineable, and, unfortunately, my mind has too many images on reserve; the picture I imagined could have been real. It was real. Virginia Tech is so close. There is no reason it didn't happen here, I keep thinking, and it's true. I cannot know what it is like for a classroom to turn into a horror scene, for the sound of gunfire to echo off of walls intended only to house the sounds of ideas making themselves manifest, of young people planning the weekend, planning their lives. And yet, it happened, and it may as well have happened here. This has happened before. This will happen again.

For the rest of the day I overheard bits and pieces of student conversations, young people on cell phones and gathered in circles, trying to piece together the broken reality they shared moments before. I saw a few people hugging, not to say hello, but because they couldn't say anything at all, because there was nothing to say, there were no words yet. In those first moments, words were only tools to form numbers, locations, and brief, objective descriptions of when, where, how. There were no words to answer the worst question: why? Nor are there words to address that question now; still, we have words, and we should use them in their most important capacity: to bridge the gaps between us, to navigate the dark places in our souls, and to find each other in the darkness.

The lump in my throat remains; it's the pressure of my fear, my sadness, and my frustration, building behind the wall that separates my world from myself, me from you, us from them. Cho felt the same pressure, but he didn't believe he had any way of releasing it. I won't speculate on Cho's psychological state, his development, or his moral fortitude. I will only say that some small part of me knows that the tragedy includes the young man by whose hands it was wrought. I do not know how Cho fell, or was pushed, into such abysmal despair, but I do know that I too have had glimpses of despair. Despair is a waking nightmare that hurts. Despair produces profound alienation. Just when we need a shoulder to cry on, alienation drives a wedge between the self and the world. There is only one way to return from alienation, and it is by the guiding hand of another. We are lucky when there is a hand to grasp, and even luckier if that hand searches us out in the darkness. Sometimes we stumble across a generous spirit, someone we never expected to follow into the light. Sometimes we get left behind, and sometimes we choose to stay behind. I think it's important to keep my eyes open, because I never know when they might be like a lighthouse for a lost soul, for someone battered by an unexpected slight, a missed opportunity, a rejection, a failure, or a bad dream. Sometimes I think smiles are psychotropic. Most times I'm sure of it.

Some people have asked me, "what would you have done if you were in one of the classrooms," or, "do you think if there were vets in the room he would have gotten as far as he did?" I have asked myself the same questions. As for the first, I think we all ask ourselves "what would you do," but we might not ask ourselves, "what will you do?" I don't know what I would have done. I probably would have refused to believe the scattered pops weren't construction noises, like many of the survivors reported; how could I logically tell myself otherwise? And then it would have been too late. I suppose it's possible that I would have heard him reloading and would have seized the chance to act, but to say I would've done anything is to apply reason to a situation that defies the very limits of reason.

What I will do is mourn. I will continue to invest my thought and emotional energy in the Virginia Tech tragedy. I will revisit the moment when my mother called, the moment when I first saw Cho's face, when I saw his multimedia manifesto, when I read his plays, when I gave my TA from the fall a hug outside of the library, when I first spoke with my girlfriend, when I watched the crowd swell around me at the amphitheater the following day, when I looked at the faces of my fellow students and saw them contorted with confusion, slack with bewilderment, swollen with grief, and looking for reassurance. But I will also be free with my smiles, I will share my attention, I will make time for friends, and I will continue to hope that we will somehow find a way to become closer to one another. In the moments following the tragedy, I saw friends hugging, and I saw tentative smiles searching for sad souls to warm up. I saw hands reaching out to grasp the fallen, the straying, and the lonely. I saw real compassion. I saw compassion in action, not on a table by the lawn.

I do not mean to deride the activism and selflessness of student philanthropists, but I do mean to suggest that there is a difference between compassion that comes from that lump in your throat and compassion that comes from a "cause"; causes are usually distant -- though not always -- but it takes something that "hits close to home" to make your throat swell, to drive you out in search of another human being, anyone, just for the affirmation of eye contact, or for the salvific interchange:

"Are you okay?"
"I'm okay."

Or, if you're lucky enough to trust someone:

"Are you okay?"
"No."
"Me neither."

We have to remember that there is more to bring us together here than there is to keep us apart. "Here" is the University of Virginia, but it is also Charlottesville, the United States, the World. We are so many different things, but we are all here, now, together, in this little plot of Earth, on this great big Earth. I find myself hoping that the Virginia Tech tragedy will awaken the mechanisms of suffering and compassion in my fellow students and Americans to the distant, but very present, suffering of Iraqis, Afghans, and Americans in the Middle East. I'm hoping there is room in the hearts of my fellow students to acknowledge and mourn the perpetual tragedy unfolding every day as a result of American foreign policy. I'm hoping that those who support the war policies will still find a place in their hearts to grieve for the lost lives, the ruined minds, and the devestated communities of Iraq and Afghanistan. I'm also hoping that those whose lives will all too soon return to pre-Virginia Tech levels of self-absorption will remember Virginia Tech from time to time, remember the shock, the grief, and the disillusionment, and maybe allow their hearts to take them to other sites of tragedy. If you can identify with Virginia Tech students, you can identify with American soldiers, and, with a small investment of heart, you can identify with the an Iraqi mother whose daughter's bus was destroyed on the way to school, or an Iraqi child whose father fell in the crossfire on his way to work, or young man whose anger at the injustice of the world gets the best of him. Call him a terrorist or call him a mujahideen, but let your heart reach out to him, to his mother and father, and to his siblings. Bear him no hatred; you could have just as easily been him, his mother, his father, or his sibling. My birth in the United States was the accident of history; I am fully aware that I am an American in Charlottesville and not an Iraqi in Baghdad only by the whims of chance; I do not hold anything against the Iraqi, and I hope s/he holds nothing against me. I hope that someday we can be friends for longer.

There is no reason to withhold the tools of connection, or to save compassion for a time of tragedy. There is every reason to overcome the distance between us. The human heart holds infinite reserves of love. Make contact.