death on the day of love: requiem in pace redux

The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre. It's inevitable that that's what it will be called. Death on the day of love. Or Virginia Tech revisited. As of now, it's six dead, including the shooter.

How did we get to a place that mass-murder is a solution for one's personal demons? Will expressions of outrage and the outpouring of grief prevent the next such event, or simply encourage it? I cringe at the thought of the facile platitudes that will be spewed forth over the next few days from politicians and pundits who are seeking personal gain from tragedy.

What role is played by a political and commercial leadership that is so utterly sold-out to money that it cares not for human life if a profit can be made in war? By politicians and "intelligence" officials who justify torture as a means for gathering information?

Why does this strike so deeply, while genocide in places like Darfur seem so remote and irrelevant?

How dark is the human heart? How thin is our veneer of civilization?

I don't know what else to write. "Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD" (Psalm 130:1)

requiem in pace

I'm now adding to the superabundance of blog writings about the shooting at Virginia Tech, though I have not yet fully analyized all the information, nor synthesized it in my mind. I may never get there. So, for now, some thoughts that I hope are not too vacuous:

- I ache for all the families and friends wounded by this; the colateral damage will go far, far beyond 33 deaths.

- though it is hard to see the good in something like this, I am convinced that some good will arise, that some relationships will be improved, that some needed introspection will occur.

- it seems that every one I talk to, regardless of her or his views on gun laws, sees support for those views in these events.

- politicians, being politicians, will react by passing laws, many (most?) of which will be irrelevant; the cynicism of political and business leaders continues to astound me.

- the mass murder is universally condemned as a very bad, very evil thing, a condemnation with which I strongly concur. What is the basis of that universal condemnation amongst people who otherwise claim to have little in common as a basis of morality?

- many more people are killed each week in places like Baghdad; why do people not react as strongly? Is it because of proximity, is it racism, what?

- how can the political and military leaders involved in adventurism around the globe possibly condemn this event without condemning themselves? What is the difference between pulling the trigger oneself, and sending others to pull the trigger? Either way, people who were simply trying to go about their own lives are hurt and killed.

- after posting the above, this poem came to me as appropriate, somehow.

The Second Coming
William Bulter Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?