Virginia Tech

If 32 Americans were killed in Iraq, how many hours of news coverage would they get? Or if 132 were killed in car wrecks during prom week? Without the media to tell us, we wouldn’t know what was important.

I heard of the Virginia Tech shootings over Fox News while I waited in the service lounge of the local Chevy dealership. I heard of it, and heard of it, and heard of it; for three and one half hours, I heard of it. In the background, Barry Manilow sang romantic music, and the grill of a $66,000 Cadillac truck reflected a harsh fluorescent glow against the gray day that drooped beyond the floor to ceiling windows. Occasionally, I would take a walk among the acres of cars. Battleship-size SUVs are not a thing of the past, I thought, as I noted the twenty inch tires on Tahoes and Escalades.

Fox had nothing new or remotely reliable to show or report, yet it couldn’t keep from showing and reporting, with split screen coverage no less. Every few minutes, the same police dogs sniffed the same spot of grass on one side of the screen while the same photographers photographed the same other photographers on the other. The announcer interviewed a student over the telephone. “Like, me and my roommate heard that the killer chained the doors,” she reported dutifully over a bad connection. “Did I understand you to say that the killer chained the doors?” the announcer asked in what I took to be mock horror. “Well, like, that’s what the man on the TV said.”

The “fair and impartial” network decided early on that Virginia Tech was to blame for not closing the campus after the first shootings, and every question was framed to prove it. The day dragged on, and I wondered why I didn’t care more. I felt bored in advance by the coming days of eulogies, analyses, and blame; and I wanted to go home. Beyond that, my thoughts were as lifeless as the machines by which I was surrounded, any one of which cost more than most people in the Third World earn in a lifetime of making things for Americans. A dozen other customers watched the flat-screen TV alongside me, and no one said anything. No one looked like they felt anything. Maybe they too just wanted to go home.

The dealership had a café, and outside the café there stood a fountain that kept throwing water back into the rainy skies, but the rain just kept on falling, and falling, and falling. I wished I had a new lover. A new lover would make me feel alive. A new lover would make me feel that something mattered. A new lover would give me a new illusion, and a new illusion would devour my thoughts, at least until she wasn’t new anymore.

I had wine for supper tonight, and I will blame what I just wrote on it, because the responsibility simply cannot be my own. The shooter at Virginia Tech—was he responsible? All the explanations we are likely to hear will be either dismissive or excusatory. They will prove that he was crazy or evil, or they will prove that society is crazy or evil, but that’s as far as they will go, and it’s not very far. Maybe we don’t really want to understand him because “…if you stare long enough into the Abyss, the Abyss stares also into you.” Surely, the shooter at Virginia Tech stared into the abyss for an awfully long time.

Don't come unless you're whole-hog enthusiastic

I just sent a letter about city priorities to the Register Guard. If it is printed, my name will be mud in the bicycle activist community just as it is already mud in the peace activist community. Most groups prefer no support at all to support that is qualified or ambivalent. This makes me a marginal member, at best, in every group I join. I am marginal in my lodges, because I do not believe in a personal god. I am marginal in my mineral club, because I have no interest in lapidary. I am marginal in the butterfly society that I recently started attending, because I am more interested in plants.

One of the things I valued about the anti-tax protest was that Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and Libertarians, all came together in harmony to gather signatures, and no one thought it necessary to discuss our differences. I think it safe to say that we even delighted in the fact that our differences didn’t matter. I only wish I could feel that way in other groups. What I have often found—with cause-oriented groups especially—is that, because many of the members think the same about a variety of other issues, they don’t realize how exclusionary they are. Liberal groups are worse about this because people are blindest to their failings in areas they pride themselves on most, areas such as tolerance and openness.

Ralph and Rhonda

We went dirt biking yesterday—really and truly sliding through diarrhea-like mud and flying down steep and curvy hills, all while dodging stumps, roots, and rocks. The dogs thought our new hobby grand: lots of inviting mud puddles, water to drink whenever they pleased, and a speed suited to canine legs. We discovered the trail entirely by accident while biking logging roads. Someone had even installed ramps on the curves, so bikes could round them really fast. Not that Peggy and I rounded them really fast. No, not us. We walked them really slow, because we don’t have mud tires on our bikes. We have all-terrain tires, and all-terrain tires are not really meant for ALL terrains, and they turn to squirrels in mud. One minute they’re gliding along nicely, and the next minute they’re either lying down for a nap, or sliding sideways to the direction of travel.

We discussed these traits—Peggy and I—and we determined that we did not like them. They are thrilling traits, to be sure, but we agreed that it is better to have at least some idea of what one’s bike is about to do. Although nothing in life is guaranteed, even a vague notion about ones future is superior to no notion at all.

Because Peggy’s new bike is on order, she was on her Raleigh commuter with its two-inch tires. Having christened my new bike Rhonda, I determined that Peggy’s bike needed a name too, so I named him Ralph. Peggy liked the name Ralph, pointing out that since we had B names for out last four pets—Bonnie, Baxter, Becky, Buster, it is only fitting that we have R names for our bikes. That way, we can tell our dogs from our bicycles without looking at their undersides. Inspired and uplifted (although more the former than the latter) by her sentiment, I named my other bike—the one that was home in the garage—Ramon; and Peggy named her other bike—the one that is on order—Rufus. I thought Rufus was too bookish a name for a mud bike. I thought Rufus sounded more like a sedentary pipe smoker in loungewear, and I generously offered to donate the name Ramon to her for her bike, but she was obstinate as usual. On my gloomier days, I suspect that the woman lacks good sense as evidenced by the fact that she so often disagrees with me.

Ralph cost $400, yet he performed better on mud than Rhonda who cost $1,700. I was naturally perplexed—and even a little put out—by this, and I began thrashing around in my mind for a comforting explanation. Ralph is heavier by ten pounds, I told myself, so maybe his greater weight made for greater stability. That sounded plausible, but I could hardly stop with one theory lest it turn out to be wrong, and leave me with no theory at all.

My next theory was that Ralph’s 26-inch diameter wheels are more stable than Rhonda’s 20-inch wheels. I didn’t like that theory much, because I could see no upside to it if it were true. The next thing that came to mind was that Ralph is a boy, and Rhonda is a girl. No that couldn’t be it, not in our enlightened age. If women firepersons are the equal of men firepersons, then women bicycles should be equally equal to men bicycles.

This left me with but one possibility: Peggy is a better biker than I, at least in the mud. I liked this explanation best of all, because it was the only one subject to change. When a person has spent a lot of money for a bike, and said bike does not perform as well as another bike that costs a quarter as much, any explanation that excuses the bike is preferable to any explanation that blames the bike.

Thoughts of hunting and war

Carl is a Masonic brother with whom I feel a kinship. Our grandparents were from Southern Appalachia. We were raised in the Church of Christ. We never leave home unarmed. Tonight, I discovered another commonality when we somehow started talking about World War II. Carl knew a lot more about it than I, but it wasn’t the subject that was the common bond, but our feelings about the subject. Carl was only seven when the war ended, but he grew up listening to the stories of veterans, and as he related some of these stories, he began to cry. I assumed that this would prompt him to change the subject, but he stayed squarely on World War II, and with each anecdote, he cried some more. I too cry about World War II, but only when I am watching documentaries, and only in the company of Peggy. To cry in the company of other men (we were in the proxmity of many men) would mortify me. Yet, I thought well of Carl for doing that which I would not. Mine is a strange world, and it gets stranger all the time.

For example, Carl is a bow-hunter. I’m appalled by sport killing, and I’m especially appalled by killing with inefficient weapons. So, how do I reconcile Carl’s compassion for the suffering of soldiers with his callousness toward the suffering of animals? I cannot. It is like the respect I have for his tears, although I would be ashamed if they were my tears. To be human is to live in contradiction.

If all I knew of Carl was that he killed animals with arrows, I would think very poorly of him. It is only because I know him as a sensitive and complicated man that I don’t feel inclined to condemn him for hunting but to seek to understand him. This is a hopeless task, because there is nothing he could say that I have not heard, or that would change my mind. There comes a point at which further comprehension of another person’s experience would require that I abandon my own. This point marks the difference between intellectual understanding and emotional understanding.

I can accept Carl as a worthwhile person who has a cruel hobby only because I have seen other sides of him, but it is often hard to see other sides of people. It is often hard to even want to see other sides of people. In lodge tonight, for example, I muddled my way through the ritual, not because I didn’t know it, but because I was so distraught over a war protest in Portland last weekend. People at that protest burned an American flag and an effigy of an American soldier. One man even defecated upon a flag.

I am so upset by this that I am considering ending my support of the antiwar effort on an organized level. I deplore, detest, and despise the Portland protestors so intensely that I actually could (not that I actually would) shoot them on sight. If anything, I hate them more than I would hate them if I were not actively opposed to the war. They defile my idealism, and they show me something about myself.

What they show me is how easy it is to turn my desire to oppose the war in the spirit of peace completely upon its head. I am so intent upon love and goodwill that every fiber of my being wants to annihilate these people for their hatefulness. They make me as they are, or rather they elicit a part of me that is like a part of them.

How am I to deal with such feelings? That is what I struggled with during lodge. I was so focused that I literally forgot what lodge I was in, and performed a segment of the Odd Fellow ritual. After my talk with Carl, I thought about how wonderful it would be if I could see these flag burners as I see him—as complex people who sometimes act badly for, what are to them, good reasons. This is easier said than done, because I don’t know them. I only imagine them. I imagine how empowering it must feel to don black hoods, and to make a statement so powerful that it reaches millions. They don’t feel the evil they do, because they are too intoxicated by their power.

They are like the American soldiers who, having seen their comrades killed by the very people they were trying to help, massacred two-dozen Iraqis. Maybe they will feel badly someday, or maybe they won’t, but, in the moment, they saw themselves as the worms that had turned; and it felt good. I suspect that these demonstrators also regard themselves as people who have no power; as people who can neither tolerate the status quo nor change it; as people who believe that almost no one knows or even cares about the pain they feel over the direction their country has taken.

I can relate, but no matter how hard it is to be constructive, anything less makes a person into what he hates. I suspect that I am able to see this from a more mature and thoughtful perspective than that of the demonstrators in Portland, yet I am finding it nearly impossible to heed my own best thinking.