(This is a reposting, with minor modifications, of a diary I published in WYFP? a year ago yesterday.)
Most of the world United States will be celebrating Valentine's Day today. But February 14 has a different, darker meaning for me and my fellow Huskies. Follow me below the fold for more.
It was three years ago today that a troubled young man (and an alumnus of NIU) named Steven Kazmierczak walked into a lecture hall on the campus of Northern Illinois University and opened fire on those gathered there, killing five students and wounding sixteen others, before turning the gun on himself and taking his own life. (ilona wrote a diary about the events just after they happened; I followed suit the next day with new information and reflections on the events themselves.)
Before I go on, let's pause for a moment to remember those whose lives were cut short untimely on that sad, cold day three years ago:
Daniel Parmenter, age 20
Catalina Garcia, age 20
Ryanne Mace, age 19
Sgt. Julianna Gehant, age 32
Gayle Dubowski, age 20
By most accounts, two years is about the length of time most people will need to work through an uncomplicated grief reaction fully. I think most folks at NIU have done that, but there are still rough edges (and those may never go away).
As our anniversary date rolls around again, I've noticed conversations around campus are turning toward the tragedy more frequently of late. It's interesting, the things that people remember--and the things that trigger those memories. One of my colleagues remarked the other day that the sound of helicopters flying overhead has made her uneasy ever since that day, when between news organizations, air ambulances, and police operations, there must have been at least half a dozen helos in the air above campus at any given time. One of my triggers is the sight of news trucks--for a good month (or maybe it only seemed that long), there were a dozen or more of them parked in a line somewhere on campus.
I was reminded of that trigger a couple of weeks ago, when one of my rougher edges also came to the fore. Not long after the shootings, then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich came to campus to announce that the state would provide $40 million to tear down Cole Hall (the site of the shootings) and replace it with a new, improved lecture facility. That never happened, but the state did commit to provide some money for renovating half of Cole, and for repurposing the part where the shootings took place. Just before the Illinois primary election, now Gov. Pat Quinn also came to campus, to announce that he was releasing that part of the state construction funds allocated to the Cole repairs. I was out running an errand that morning and, as I often do, had to walk past Cole Hall and the memorial garden. Coming up toward the campus commons, I spotted a couple of news trucks parked in the visitors' lot, presumably for the governor's press conference--and I winced. I know they have a job to do, and I know that, sadly, their customers expect them to do rude things like shove microphones into the faces of people who would like nothing better than to be left alone. I have some experience in journalism myself--but it's hard to get rid of my feelings of rancor toward the profession, after seeing (and personally experiencing) their intrusive presence so frequently in the days and weeks after the shootings.
As I said the day after it happened:
It was said in many places yesterday, including the local bar where I met up with one of my fellow history graduate students for a few pints of Guinness, that if anyplace on earth should be safe, it should be a college classroom. But, as President Peters noted yesterday and again this morning, short of putting armed guards on every door to every building at every public institution across the country, there is no way to guarantee that kind of safety. To borrow a phrase from the second-season opener of The West Wing, yesterday's events, like those of last year at Virginia Tech, or the brutal murder of one student by another at my alma mater some years ago, were the work of madmen--or at the very least of individuals who were not fully compos mentis but who were determined to carry out their plans. We can't protect ourselves from that kind of individual or those kinds of plans--and we're only fooling ourselves if we believe otherwise... If we live our lives in fear of what may happen, can we really be said to be living at all?
I know it's a pipe dream to hope (much less think or expect) that I or anyone else in the NIU family is ever likely to get back to that sense of "It can't happen here" that we enjoyed in our blissful ignorance until two years ago tomorrow. But I want to! I want that placid, peaceful campus back. I want to inhabit a world where the sound of sirens or the sight of news vans doesn't make me cringe. I want to go back to the me that could respond compassionately to news of campus shootings like the one that happened a year ago at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, but without the deep visceral ache that came along with the realization that it was now my duty to help welcome another reluctant member into the club that nobody wants to join.
But I can't. I have to do those things, because that's the only way we ever get close to anything resembling sanity. And it's the only way that I want to live my life. I will not, in the words of NIU President John G. Peters, allow a single act of violence to define me, or keep me from being who I am and doing what I do.
But neither will I let the fourteenth of February pass without pausing to remember those young lives tragically cut short, and to mourn a little for the loss of innocence that so many of us experienced that day. A bit of appropriate music to play us out:
Iustorum animae in manu Dei sunt,
et non tanget illos tormentum mortis.
Visi sunt oculis insipientium mori;
illi autem sunt in pace.
The souls of the just are in the hand of God,
and the torment of death shall not touch them.
To the eyes of those who are without understanding they seemed to die;
nevertheless, they are at peace. --William Byrd, gradual for the Feast of All Souls (1605), my translation from the original Latin
And lastly, Brett Mitchell and the NIU Philharmonic playing part of Ralph Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (from September 2005):
Update: And in the "why this is still important" category, there was another shooting on a university campus today, in Tennessee--though fortunately, no one was killed, "just" a minor wound. I was dismayed to note that the first (and so far only) comment on the story in today's local newspaper about today's memorial was a suggestion that NIU's gun-free policy contributed to the carnage. To that person (and anyone else with similar views), I can only repeat what I said in the immediate aftermath of the shootings:
I feel the same way, though not to the level of wanting to wreak mayhem on their persons, about some of the talking-heads and bloggers and pundits that I've heard or seen bloviating on this tragedy and using it to pimp for their pet political causes. Far too many people--and I say this as someone who has never liked guns and who does think that our gun laws are far too lax--have been arguing that all we need to do to prevent further tragedies like this is to ban guns altogether. A far smaller minority have argued the opposite case, that we should let everybody carry a gun with them into class. I call bullshit on both of those ideas. Blaming the guns (or suggesting that everyone should have one) is too easy of a fix. As one of my colleagues said to me today, gun control would be like putting a Band-Aid on a severed artery: it may look and feel good, but it will have absolutely no effect on the actual problem.