what everyone else has been talking about

The days are blurring….It’s now 3 am Wednesday morning and I believe I’ve been awake since 3 am Tuesday morning but I barely remember anymore.  Spent almost 7 hours working on my digital story and it still isn’t finished.  I won’t go into the detailled account what needs to get done this week – that’s just lame.

Mom called me today.  She says that a neighbor of ours (not someone I knew well) was killed in the Virginia Tech shootings.  He graduated from my high school the year ahead of me.  I didn’t know him, but my little brother was in the musical with his little brother.  That’s the thought that haunting me right now, of a thirteen-year-old boy losing his older brother in a mass shooting hundreds of miles away.

The local community at home has really bonded together.  I scanned facebook while I was getting pics for my digital story and pretty much everyone in my town has something in their profiles in his memory.  Lots of people have changed their profile pictures to something related to Virginia Tech.  Not that facebook activism amounts to much, but it has successfully made me feel guilty for not taking part.

I don’t know though, I’m not sure if I’m ready for a more "activist" style response.  At this point at least, I’m the person who would attend the vigil and stand very quietly in the back row.  Activism is so wonderful and satisfying when you have a clear enemy you can be mad at, and channel that rage into doing something.  In Darfur activism, the enemies are the Janjaweed militia and the bystander world.  In pro-Israel activism, the enemies are the terrorists (not Arabs, just terrorists) and the complacent/completely misguided world.  But for the VT shooting?  The enemy is dead.  He committed suicide.  I don’t know whom to be mad at or what to do with my anger, so right now, I can’t be angry.

Though there is a bit of self- anger/guilt.  I am an op/ed columnist for the Weekly newspaper at the school.  My most recent column before the shooting praised the repeal of the draconian DC handgun ban.  The piece was less a pro-gun rights in general and more about the specific descision and I still think repealing the law was a good idea for practical and democratic reasons.  But the timing……. It’s like how the NRA had planned their conference in Colorado long long long before Columbine….Bad timing, but the part that I’m ashamed of is that after the initial shock when I learned about the shooting and the horrifying detail, my next reaction was fear of getting my ass kicked for having written that column last week and how to save my ass.  I’m a terrible excuse for a human being.  For the hour and a half that I slept yesterday, I had a dream that one of my good friends had been murdered by another good friend.  It was scary.

Enough on this for now because I’m exhausted, but more to say at some point