Virginia Tech - Another Sign of a Trend

Every parent, friend, lover, or relative knows what it is like to have someone you love go away. It is hard, isn't it? When they are going to college, it has a different flavor because of your being proud of them, doesn't it? Now when they arrive at a choice place of education that missing them is strong, but it is with this pride of what they will be in place to achieve upon graduation, that forms a great expectation. Such is the life of those who plan to succeed and attempt to do so.

On this morning, April 16 2007- a gunman was loose on the campus of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. One of the nations most well known, and respected campuses of conservative and high quality education, had become a place of violence.

It's a jump in logic to question violence on campuses, or to assert that we are a more violent generation post Columbine high school, and others, but doesn't it seem odd to you that in the last five years, these incidents appear to have increased in number? There have always been troublesome elements in the campus life, but were they always violent, involving guns?

It is important that as a nation the United States not fall prey to the negative notion that our schools can't succeed, due to violence. Such is not the case, many of our campuses have never, and will never, experience violence. To change all that we do in terms of campus freedoms, in order to prepare for an infinite number of potential harms, is to assign the rights of all to a few, and control to the minor elements of campus life.

Most campus participants are there to learn, our students for the most part, are good students, but the information about them, the glut of mass negativity, is not true. One such example came home to this writer at the local level where the high school locally is, rumored to be full of students with little respect for authority. Yet in every instance of personally visiting that campus, those same students have appeared anything but rude and undisciplined- so is the question, which is the truth? Are we providing a negative backdrop from a few points of instance that is negative, and in doing so are we painting an untruth about our students in general?

We will mourn the students at Virginia Tech who perished, the students who were injured, and the families who were involved. As we come to know more about whom they are, that we might reach out to them. Let us not shrink back from the violence done to these students and their families, but let's instead, choose deliberately becoming involved in the follow-up that the truth might come out. America is a nation of caring and concerened peoples, this is what has made us the greatest nation in the history of the world; let's continue to work toward making that sparkling truth of freedom a world-shaking fact.