The Paradox of Tragedy

Tragedy: an event in which one or a number of individuals are overcome by some superior force or circumstance, resulting in great loss and misfortune.

Miracle: an event or effect contrary to the established constitution and course of things, or a deviation from the known laws of nature; a supernatural event, or one transcending the ordinary laws by which the universe is governed.

A man walks into a bar, and the bartender, having a bad day, looks up and blows him away with a shot gun for no particular reason. A tragedy, by any account. As the man lays there dead, events suddenly and inexplicably reverse course. The bullets retreat from their entry wounds, and the man sits up and breathes, alive once again. A miracle by any account.

A young girl dying of cancer wakes up one day to find that although she was expected to live no longer than a few more months, that the cancer had retreated into full remission. A miracle by any account. The following day, events suddenly and inexplicably reverse course, and it’s discovered that the cancer has returned to eventually claim the life of the young girl. A tragedy by any account.

It is safe to say that tragedy is a miracle’s opposing entity…yet the distinction between the two, like anything and it’s genuine opposite, is much more narrow than one might suspect. In fact, it can be argued that the most important characteristic of a miracle is exactly the same as the most important characteristic of a tragedy– that both are extraordinary events, and tangible examples of life imitating irony. Miracles are the standard for inspirational events among mankind, though a similar obsession with tragedy, often perceived as morbid and ill rooted, is simply an obsession with the exact same thing; a yearning for something great and unpredictable; something meaningful and life-changing with which to contrast the rest of the mundane and mechanical universe.

If there is one great tragedy in recent years that I find myself reflecting on frequently, it’s the Columbine High School disaster of 1999. With the advantage now of complete hindsight, most of the subtle but excruciatingly important details surrounding it have all, by now, been flushed to the surface. The tragedy of it is obvious from a mile away…but the miracle is always in the details.

When hearing accounts of the story, you can’t help but imagine it as it would have happened if it were your own high school. I happened to be in high school at the time, so the imaginative bridge between the Columbine school and my own has always been very short, and easy to cross. Helping with this is the fact that it was a small town, much like my own, with the same types of conflicting individuals, social factions, and cruel displays of adolescent Darwinism (minus the extraordinary display of Darwinism for which the entire event is known) as my own high school. One can’t help but wonder what one’s own fate would have been had they been there, based not only on physical location in the building, but as detailed events would later show, on one’s relationship with the types of individuals that carried out the unusual, violent, but overall personal act of revenge.

John Savage was in the Library, crouching under a table as the gunmen walked around shooting other students, shouting such things as "who’s the fag now?" One of them finally approached the table he was hiding under and ordered him to identify himself, when he did the gunman hesitated for the first time, and ultimately spared him.

"Are you going to kill me?" John asked.

"No, dude. Just run. Just get out of here."

He remembers thinking that if he were going to die, he wanted it to end quickly. When the gunman told him to go, he did not wonder why. That would come later.

"I’ve tried to go over every word of every conversation with him, trying to figure out what I said or did that made him want to let me go," says John, now 27. "But just that I was nice to him, and always tried to show him some level of respect, is all I can think of."

The implication that this gesture of mercy carries is deceivingly enormous. The kids were not killing at random, as it would appear from peering down from very high up, but rather unconsciously calculated…or at least aimed, not exactly at specific individuals, but at a certain attitude or disposition that was offensive to them; an attitude that most of the school shared, but that some were mysteriously exempt from. So what was the attitude? And if it be the gunmen in the wrong, and the attitude in the right, why then was the attitude punished so severely? If right is defined by one’s ability to survive and prosper, how can they be exempt from blame in regards to their own fate?

How many poor misbegotten school punching-bags like these boys have been spared some ridicule, and eventual self destruction, because of the fear that the actions of the Columbine shooters instilled in America? The miracle in the details is that through unprecedented bloodshed, a lesson of simple kindness and mutual respect is able to surface. The shooter’s noble goal, through twisted and horrible motives and methods, to stand up to the unwarranted bullying and discrimination and claim revenge, worked in larger and more universally beneficial ways than any of us could have ever imagined possible.