As I’m writing this, I’m looking around the Steve and Nini Horn Center which is filled with students coming and going. Everyone seems to be either rushing to finish a late paper or running out to get some lunch – nothing out of the ordinary. But today is different. It’s only the day after the Virginia Tech shootings and when you read this, it will have been three days.
But no matter how many days pass, this event will go down in history as one of the largest mass shootings to ever occur and will stay in our minds for a very long time.
As information from the event began to pour onto news Web sites, we learned that the shooter was identified as South Korean immigrant Cho Seung-Hui. Pictures of Cho surfaced and we discovered he was an average-looking college kid that could pass for any student walking around at Cal State Long Beach.
As I’m watching these images and reading the latest news about the event, I’m still dumbfounded as to how such an event could have happened at the hands of a college-age person. Maybe because it occurred on a college campus and maybe because most of the victims’ ages are close to ours, I believe that every college campus in the United States and in the rest of the world will mourn this event for quite awhile.
I honestly hope that we can survive this one, and not through hatred towards a person who was obviously not mentally stable, but through some other means.
There’s so much a journalist or a blogger can say or write, but we will never be able to fully relate as much as those who survived this event. Let’s just keep those who’ve died in our hearts and hope that those who survive find a coping mechanism that best works for them and their families.
– Julio Salgado
