Virginia Tech

Ever since this happened, I've been trying to come up with something inspirational, or comforting, or at least with a lesson to be learned from all this. I just couldn't do it.

There's nothing good, or with the potential for good, in this situation. There are no lessons to learn, no "We shall overcome" speach to make, no comfort.

I'm sure other people will come up with lessons to be learned from all this. The holes the mentally ill slip thru, the ease with which they get guns, the ineptness with which the police/college security handled the situation....But these are all things we already know, all lessons we should have already learned.

And what words of hope, of inspiration, can assuage the pain, the loss we all feel? What message can heal the wound, not only of the deaths, the senseless waste of so much energy and potential, but of the devastating reminder that evil triumphs far too often?

America, it seems, is destined to have our innocence shattered, our naivette destroyed, our blinders removed. The Oklahoma City bombing, Sep 11, the wars in Iraq and Afganistan, the tragic loss of so many vital souls at VA Tech, all this and more pile upon us and there is nothing we can point to that helps the pain and the frustration. We can only acknowledge the loss, the relearned lesson that even here, in the most powerful and free country in the world (in our opinion, at least), we are not secure, not immune to evil, and that, at any time, any place, any one of us could be ripped away because of senseless hate.

This is no good.

I love words, and language. I love to work with them, to write them, feel the rhythm, the poetry, and the surge of feeling they evoke. But there is no comfort in them now. Even if I were to express myself at the height of what eloquence I can muster, rather than trudging thru this inadequate composition, they would do no good, teach no wisdom, provide no comfort.

There's nothing to find.