Virginia Tech Tragedy Dissuades Faith in Humanity

I didn't think I that I could lose even more of my faith in humanity, in myself even. Virginia Tech. I thought that only high school students were idiot enough to go on a bullet-showering rampage. Apparently I was wrong. I hope Cho Seung-Hui burns in the deepest circle of whatever hell he might have ever, for a scrap of a second, believed in. What has humanity come to? Who is so unbelievably angry that thirty-two people, human beings with lives and passions and memories and chains of loved ones, have to suffer and die the most cruel of deaths--at the hands of another, fellow human? Was there no moment, no heartwarming, compassionate instant where this man was loved, or loved someone himself?

So he was supposedly mentally unstable. Well, yeah. When a person seems to have forsaken every ounce of happiness and appreciation for people, when they have forced themselves to overcome those "constricting" boundaries of mercy, I'd say mentally unstable was quite the understatement.

My hometown of Fort Collins has been grappling with such morally detrimental issues over the past few weeks as well. A junior high school student was found with a "pretend" hit list. A man at a party shot himself in the head in front of fifty people on the outskirts of town. A man killed his neighbor over a long-term feud then hung himself in his apartment. On April 18th, Colorado State University was put under lockdown early in the morning when an unarmed man climbed to the top of a residence hall-not a very tall one, I might add-and threatened to jump off. A close friend of mine was late to his job at a coffee shop because of the lockdown, along with being shaken up by other things than just caffeine.

Incidents like these get a person thinking. What could possibly have driven this man to the rooftops of a four-story building to leap to his grotesque and untimely death? I wake up in the morning to see these horrifying headlines and can't help but think, "Why? Where are people getting these ideas?" Oh, but on the bright side, a Fort Collins high school won the national tournament in the Science Bowl.

A few weeks back, the Supreme Court, lead by our favorite president George W. Bush's pocket mouse Chief Justice John Roberts decided that it was up to politicians to vote on and decide the most intimate and personal decisions for a woman in a highly troubling time of her life. The Supreme Court passed a law banning partial-birth abortion, therefore, abortions as early as twelve to fifteen weeks. Not has the court shockingly reversed its past decisions, like the infamous case of Roe v. Wade, but it also makes it illegal to get an abortion when a woman's health is at stake. Since when does the Supreme Court get to rewrite the Constitution?

If I ever find that the one female justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, did not kick and scream against the Court's decision, I will be utterly at loss for words to describe my shame in being a woman. How dare the Court deny help to a woman in trouble? Doesn't the world have a bit of an overpopulation problem anyway? A highly cynical observation, but a valid one.

The war on Iraq needs to end. Now.

Life is so very, very precious. Granted, there is too much of it on our planet, but those with lives and memories and lovers and families... those are the people that have touched the safety of love, the warmth that acceptance and compassion bestows on icy hearts.

I just thought that would be common sense. I guess I was wrong.