April 17, 2007
Reacting to Tragedy Posted by Alexander Burns at 12:30 PM EST Fred Allen has written, briefly and eloquently, that in the wake of the Blacksburg tragedy, “History . . . stands silent with the rest of us at this moment.” Would that this were true, that the rest of us really were silent. But it seems that the inevitable finger-pointing has already begun. On his nightly program yesterday, Alan Colmes was not alone in demanding answers to questions like, “Why was there a two-hour lapse in between shootings? Why weren’t students notified earlier of the danger?” As Colmes’s cohost, Sean Hannity, commented, “There are a lot of questions being raised tonight about the security issue.” Cable news hosts were not the only people chattering about Blacksburg last night. Presidential candidates also began reacting to the day’s events, with Senator John McCain declaring, “We have to look at what happened here, but it doesn’t change my views on the Second Amendment.” As if anyone could possibly care, on a day like yesterday, what John McCain thinks about guns. There should certainly be a full investigation into what happened at Blacksburg. We should seek to answer all the relevant questions about campus security, mental health treatment, and the distribution and availability of guns. For the time being, though, there are professionals dealing with the immediate aftermath of the shooting. The rest of us, including politicians and pundits, might think about letting these professionals do their work and, in the meantime, making use of today as a time to mourn. History, as Fred Allen says, provides no easy advice for dealing with calamities like the one at Virginia Tech. I’d suggest that history does offer some examples for national leaders trying to remark on such a tragedy. Robert Kennedy’s unscripted reaction to the news of Martin Luther King’s death remains, I think, the best example of this. I know it has been on my mind today. On the day after Blacksburg, we might reflect on Kennedy's mournful quotation from Aeschylus: “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
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