Virginia Tech: Painful Day Without A Script

By Cynthia S. Paris
Media General News Service

For the longest time I couldn’t put my finger on it, but this is what has made me so uncomfortable about recent scrutiny of the Virginia Tech tragedy, now approaching its second anniversary.

It isn’t that the newly opened archive of documents is not a good idea. Different perspectives will come to light when fresh sets of eyes examine the thousands of notes and e-mails, piecing together, minute by minute, what transpired April 16, 2007. Such reviews may yield new guidelines for coping with – God forbid – a comparably horrific event in the future.

In fact, many colleges have instituted new policies and procedures for warning students of potentially dangerous situations. E-mail and text-message systems have been set up, tested and used somewhat successfully at Tech and elsewhere. Perhaps such preparedness can offset another tragedy. Perhaps.

It is the nature of tragedy that it is unexpected. Certainly no one expected Seung-Hui Cho to kill 32 fellow students and professors, then himself, that chilly April morning.

There was no script, no stage directions to follow, no “if this happens, then we do this,” because what happened was beyond everyone’s worst nightmare.

There was pain and panic, shock and disbelief. There were some heroes that day, and some who worked through tears, or saved their tears till later. There were some who couldn’t cry, and some who couldn’t do anything else.

How should we respond? What are we supposed to do? The questions are never-ending, overwhelming. What if his alarm hadn’t gone off, and he hadn’t gone to class? What if they had investigated the dorm shootings a little faster? What if more people in authority had picked up on the signals of Cho’s mental instability?

These questions are not idle. They may give us better procedures in the future.

But the dangerous allure of what-if is that, after the fact, the questions lead us to believe that a different scenario might have been possible. What if turns into if only, which easily becomes should have – and then the frustration begins. The administration should have let the students know sooner.

They should have kicked Cho off campus at the beginning of the year. And when each should have yields a didn’t, frustration becomes anger, and the search for responsibility can become a blame game.

When we watch a tragic story play out on a movie screen, at least a part of our brain knows (1) that it’s not real, and (2) there’s a director in charge, who knows what will happen in each scene and how the action will build to the climax. We can also expect some sort of resolution before the film is over.

That morning in Blacksburg, Cho was the director and main character in his own drama. He was the one responsible for the carnage and the heartbreak. When he was finished wreaking havoc in Norris Hall, he wrote himself out of the script.

Cho was responsible, he is the one to blame. That he removed himself from the chaos he caused doesn’t shift blame to anyone else. If only the school administration had been able to stop that exploding bomb ...

Desperately aware of the need to protect the thousands of young people in their charge, desperate for information that came too little, too late to prevent the catastrophe – still, college officials are not to blame, and can’t be held responsible for the 33 deaths and scores of injuries.

This is where if-only becomes problematic: Responding from within our own loss and pain and grief, we seem to need to place blame, we want someone to pay for what happened. Some people think university President Charles Steger should have said, “This happened on my watch; I take responsibility,” and stepped down. No. Misappropriated penance is neither necessary nor helpful. Steger’s legitimate role can be – and has been – to stay on and help with the healing.

And now it’s personal, because my son, Jesse, was finishing his junior year at Tech that April (he’s still there, in grad school). I’m very aware, always, that there but for the grace of God ... well, it’s hard even to finish that sentence, so I dare not presume to tell anyone else to get over it, to move on. But I also know we each suffer grief and loss in our own way, and that there are many, still on campus or across the country, who do need to move on. They need to as much as some parents still need answers.

We come around again to the if-only game, which, again, can be “a short and slippery slide into despair.” To the extent that media coverage is bringing to light new information, asking new questions that can make our society and institutions safer, it is fulfilling its role as public watchdog.

But if – as it seems to me – most reports ask the same questions and rehash the same information, maybe it is time to move on. We know the difference between shining a light in the darkness and tearing the scab off a wound that is trying to heal. It wasn’t just the families of the dead and wounded who were forever changed that day.

The whole Virginia Tech community (I still display my “We are all Hokies” poster) was victimized, and came together, and will prevail. To argue about who is hurting the most, or who deserves the most compensation, or who was slighted when everyone was in shock just takes us further into despair.

At the end of the day, the question behind all the searching — whether shouted in the daylight or whispered in the darkness — is still “Why?” And the final answer is, “God only knows.”

Cynthia S. Paris is Op/Ed page editor at the Richmond Times-Dispatch. You may reach her at cparis@timesdispatch.com.