Majoring in Violence & Death

When shit like this happens four times in a week, it can no longer be called a "tragedy." It is a disease. The tragedy is that we continue to accept it, by virtue of the fact that no one has taken any concrete steps to prevent it from happening again. Our noblest efforts have been devoted to campus alert systems, urgent pleas for students to register their cell phone numbers with university security or student services offices so that students can be sent a text message alerting them to the danger of a roving gunman. A text message! Think about that.

This could all happen again tomorrow, could be the next day, but more likely it will be both. And even as this bloodshed continues, we will shrug, perhaps pause a moment, chalk it all up to another day of violence on an American campus and move on. Nothing really new here, unless it's the novelty of seeing a different campus, in a different season, painted in the crimson hues of America's rampant gun violence, our favorite and most cherished sport.

I've written about this before. The echoes of apathy in our government institutions and even in the newsrooms are overwhelming. School shootings have become an accepted component of American life. Think about that.

One of my students had a question this morning about the murders at Northern Illinois University. He had missed the news and was just hearing about it from me. "Was it as many as Virginia Tech?" he asked. I told him no, his interest waned, and we moved on with the day's lesson, comforted in the knowledge that the bar had not been raised, no record had been broken. Think about that. Think about that for one goddamn minute.