The Tragedy at Virginia Tech

Posted to Richmond Times-Dispatch in response to the piece by Bart Hinkle--you could try this unlikely-looking link:http://www.timesdispatch.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=RTD%2FPage%2FRTD_SectionFront&c=Page&cid=1058750353171. The title is, "The Massacre: Atrocity at Virginia Tech Renews the Search for Elusive Answers " by A. BARTON HINKLE

I think Bart’s was the best first-day reaction piece I’ve seen anywhere. He captured the whole sequence of dismaying reactions we share, and I find it a fit representative for the Virginia journalistic point of view.

What was unusual about the piece was the number and variety of references and quotes, and how appropriate they were. Also, though, I have to praise the elegant tones he struck stringing together those other folks’ words. You can read the article out loud, with the proper inflections, and you’d have a five-minute speech of high quality.

Inflections would make good the otherwise questionable use of sarcasm in the comment about “retribution...(being) such a peace-maker” in the Middle East. Apart from being a bit inconsistent in style, it tips the point of the next paragraph, that vengeance’s pleasure is brief. Perhaps he had to get in a good zing first before bringing in the healing words. It must start now, and must continue indefinitely.

Rather than lobbing a gun control projectile, I suggest that we start our learning process from the assumption that we have now and will have among us an excess of both armaments and evil madness.

The challenge is to protect our traditional sense of security, so critical to the American lifestyle, without sacrificing our liberties too greatly. Sure methods of identifying responsibility through gun ownership would help, but it would not solve the problem of trained lunacy. We would need the equivalent of 911 alarm boxes on every corner, with trained response units organized nationally, and even that would not be enough.

As the last poster suggested, domestic violence of this kind--even if it has no connection to what we think of as international terrorism--is central to the mission of “Homeland Security,” and it shares the paradox faced in our actions abroad in the name of the “global war on terror”, all of which come from a love of liberty.