VT/VT

As we tuned into the television coverage of Monday’s shootings, it came as a shock to see the placards around the bereaved campus emblazoned with the letters "VT."

Of course, of course—the college where the tragedy occurred was Virginia Tech, and of course its nickname was VT.

Still, when we turned on the television and saw all those VT signs, we thought for a moment that we were watching a program about ourselves, about our Vermont, our VT.

And—of course—it turned out that we were. This was a presentation about us, about ourselves. Not a show about something that happened somewhere else, to someone else, but a terrible drama about things that had happened—were happening—to us. To our children. To our America. To our humanity.

It was impossible to separate the events that transpired Sunday morning at VT from our own snug, safe world in VT. The scene was so familiar: this place of learning, these young people so full of fun and seriousness and life and promise. We knew them, even before we were told their names. They were our children.

We knew these parents, too. Some of them, as they had sent their young folks off to college, recalled fondly their own campus days, the laughter and the stimulation, the new worlds to discover. They hoped for the same for these young souls, waited eagerly for their return each vacation to hear of more adventures, which stirred memories of their own. And some of them, these parents, who had not had the privilege themselves, had been a little anxious as they left their young at the gates of promise, their children entering a world a bit strange to them, in order to prepare themselves for the larger world, which was called the future.

We even knew the murderer. He was that young man with the blank stare, who seemed namelessly different from other people, who spoke seldom and poorly, but nursed something inside, something hard, something huge, that alarming youth whose eyes were impenetrable from without, unseeing from within. We had sometimes encountered this young man, within whom something did not click, a youth who had connected only with the disconnected but continuous stream of inhumanity that pours from the ether of our culture, some of it actual news of the world, some of it manufactured for our taste, as if we craved more conflict and alienation, as if there were not trouble enough already abroad in the land.

Unspeakable events like the one at Virginia Tech have exploded often enough now that we know them indeed. The fact is, we own them. We own the unbearable individual sadnesses, the general despair, the incomprehensibility of it all. We own also a gathering revulsion for what this nation of promise has harbored, hoping that this is not what we have become.

Yes indeed. VT is VT.