Virginia Tech: A Student's POV

I would like to start by saying, I am not a student of Virgina Tech. I am not a student of an exceptionally large university. I attend Daemen College in Amherst, NY, which has only about 2,000 students. In light of that fact, keep in mind: my school's undergraduate student population is about one third of the population of graduate students at Virginia Tech. I do not know the social structure of VT, but in my school's case: there's a close knit community here. Everyone knows each other, or recognizes each other. Doors are held, smiles are given, and greeting are happy, no matter how busy a passing stranger is.

I look at this tragedy and my heart beats a little faster out of sadness, and anger. My stomach flips when I think about what happened - what if it had been at my school? And my fingers start tapping, and my lips start moving, a silent song to honor those victims. My eyes get wet, thinking about the fear. Death is not a graceful thing, but nevertheless, we as human beings try to imagine our deaths as peaceful, drifting off to sleep. It was not so for those victims. They were robbed of the dignity of a proper life, and robbed of the dignity of a semi-graceful death, many, many years from now.

But, as a college student, my stomach does not only turn and churn in memory and respect - it also does this with the onset of fear of a copycat. The memories of columbine and the subsequent school shootings surface in my mind, and I realize that this will not be the last violence on a campus in the coming years. Indeed, one can only hope for the opposite - peace and nonviolence in places where intellect, decency, and respect are to be abound.

My stomach turns also, at the irony of the situation - if the student shooting had been Arabic, our media would have been shouting, "Terrorism" and "Weapons of Mass Destruction" for the next four months. I can only hope that this act of horror will remind people that terrorists, those people whom we all fear, are not just Arabic, or Muslim, or performing their destructive acts on God's behalf. No one knows, yet, what this student was thinking as he took people down with him. We may never know.

In the end, really, its just needless blood spilled, lives taken uselessly, and hearts of the relatives and friends of those victims, ruthlessly broken. But take from this tragedy, this lesson: life is a precious, precious gift. Native Americans have a common saying which, though straight and to the point, is a lesson that we can all take to heart: Today is a good day to die.

Today is a good day to die. Today is an even better day to live.