It seems that to write about anything other than the shootings in Blacksburg, Va., would be a trite, contrived attempt to avoid the elephant in the room. What happened to the students and community in Virginia is nothing less than horrific. Rather than discuss ad nauseum the gory details of what unfurled Monday morning or what is wrong with us as a society, we should first consider things that are within our immediate grasp.
What can we do? Are we safe as a campus? It may seem selfish to think of ourselves when people across the country are in the midst of such despair, but we as a campus must look to whether or not it can happen again and what role we all play in preventing any such tragedy from happening in the future.
Undoubtedly, panels should be held by those in the department of education and other policy-making groups to discuss what has gone wrong for such violence to occur, but regarding our role in the matter, we need to consider whether we are prepared to minimize the kind of harm an individual can inflict on our campus.
CSULB President F. King Alexander said it most poignantly in his address to students in an e-mail sent out Monday night: “…it seems no work place or community institution is immune from random gun violence.”
And Virginia Tech was certainly not the place anyone would have expected such a tragedy before this school year. This secluded school is in the Appalachian Mountains in an area with the pristine ecological beauty one would expect to find in the heart of a mountain range. But despite this porcelain image, Virginia Tech students have been victims of such extreme anxiety and despair since school started in the fall of 2006. According to The New York Times, on their first day of school a man, having just escaped from jail, killed two other men on the Virginia Tech campus – a security guard and deputy sheriff.
But from here, where do we Cal State Long Beach students go? What should we do? President Alexander assured in his e-mail that there are policies and procedures that are in place in case of such an emergency. He enumerated them throughout his letter, but what of the students? What is our obligation in ensuring that something like this doesn’t ever occur there?
The first thing we as a campus should do is try to orchestrate some kind of way to reach out to those who suffered in Virginia. Part of receiving a college education is entering the world not only a more knowledgeable person, but also someone who is aware and attuned to the needs of others.
In elementary school, we did can drives, and in high school many of us did other kinds of collections. Now, in college, we should try to reach out to others in another way. Unlike in grade school, there are no material goods that can alleviate the angst people in Virginia are suffering. But now we have the opportunity to reach out to the students, faculty and community members around Virginia Tech in a different way – by telling them that we care and are concerned with their mental and emotional well being.
So we should all take a moment and mourn for the students, faculty and most of all, family members of the victims at Virginia Tech. We are here for you.
