The 1 Year Marker

For all of you locals, right around now marks the 1 year anniversary of the shooting at Virginia Tech. Anyone who knows me knows that this is going to be a messy topic. I know people who knew people who were at the school when the shooting went down. As an event overall, it's sad that it happened. There, I said it, but it's also about the nicest thing I'm going to say on the subject. I know it's going to sound crass and unfeeling and highly unsympathetic, but this is not the kind of event that needs to be commemorated. As I've said, it happened, it was sad, game over. I'm tired of reliving all the bad shit that happens in this country, speaking nothing of the fact that the VT shooting seems to be set apart by others from the rest of the school shootings that have happened this past year in how people commemorate/commiserate over it. Were the student victims at VT that much more bright, promising or loved by their families and friends than those at other schools? I doubt it. Is VT a better school than the others in that it exists in some sort of magical barrier that should have prevented the shooter from shooting up the school, i.e. were the students at Tech less deserving to have this happen to them than the students at other schools which had similar shootings? Not last I checked. Was the VT shooter that much more disturbed and plagued with problems than any of the other shooters at the other schools? Probably not. My opinion might come off as callous, but this is coming from a person who watched too many grotesque things happen to far more (quanitative) undeserving people. I watched kids younger than the students at VT who were doing far more selfless and noble things suffer far worse inflictions for far longer and either be disfigured for life or die to feel anywhere near as sorry for the kids at VT over any other school shooting. One of the many people who died overseas was one of my friends, who was a great man. He was kind, smart and courteous to anyone he encountered. He truly respected people and humanity and it was a shame the way he died. I only hope he didn't see what killed him coming and that his death was quick. Quick death, a luxury that few people of traumatic events are afforded. I can't sit here and tell you what it's like to be holed up in a room with no likely escape, knowing that a crazy bastard with a gun is roaming the campus of the school you attend and you have no idea if the door to the room you're in is going to be the next to be kicked in before the gunfire resumes. I only know what it's like to have a bullet whiz past my head only about 12 inches away or hear a mortar coming in and not having a place to hide or any idea if that mortar is going to land close enough to take me to pieces or kill me. In short, I know what imminent death feels like and I'm lucky to still be here. So are many students from not only VT, but other schools as well. Some of the directly involved bystanders and other survivors will never fully recover from what they've experienced and what they saw and that sucks. However, there is no reason, especially for people with no direct ties to the incidents themselves, to prolong the mourning process for those actually involved. It annoys me that there are people who won't let the people involved work on getting past these tragic events by constantly bringing them up. The same holds true with me and Iraq. Just let it go. Give people like me and other victims of traumatic events the room to leave our respective incidents behind us and deal with it in whatever way we see fit. And for God's sakes, stop treating the VT shooting like it was so much worse than other school shootings to the point that it gets the kind of media coverage as though it was the only shooting that mattered. What matters about things like this isn't the number of casualties produced or that it happened in the state that you live in, what matters is that it happened at all. I'm tired of all the hangers-on and the bandwagon jumpers that cling to these tragedies, particularly that of the VT shooting and put those ridiculous magnetic VT ribbons on their cars and trucks. For those who weren't involved, you have no right to get all political and sentimental about something that you weren't a part of and had nothing to do with you because you think that your mourning or your armchair sympathy will earn you some sort of spiritual points towards being a good person or because you have a 5 year old that you hope will one day go to Tech. At some point, you have to bury the grief like you buried the victims if you expect to get on with your life. So in commemoration of the 1 year anniversary of the Virginia Tech and other shootings, Rest In Peace to all aspects of those events. Spend more time either hoping that history doesn't repeat itself in this regard and work together with your kid(s) to ensure that they never become a victim or perpetrator of such a waste. That is the most sure fire preventative measure there is to prevent further tragedies like these from happening.