WYFP (which stands for "What's Your Fucking Problem?") is our community's Saturday evening gathering to talk about our problems, empathize with one another, and share advice, pootie pictures, favorite adult beverages, and anything else that we think might help. Everyone and all sorts of troubles are welcome. May we find peace and healing here. Won't you please share the joy of WYFP by recommending?
Most of the world United States will be celebrating Valentine's Day tomorrow. But February 14 has a different, darker meaning for me and my fellow Huskies.
It was two years ago tomorrow 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 two years ago tomorrow:
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). It will also be interesting to see how NIU reacts to the horrible news from the University of Alabama in Huntsville yesterday. NIU's president has already been in touch with the president at UAH. I have no doubt that he promised, and we will soon begin delivering, more concrete support--just as hundreds of wonderful people from Virginia Tech did for us.
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 yesterday's, 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.
That's my fucking problem (or at least the biggest of them) tonight. Feel free to share yours in the comments. And now, to play us out, here's Brett Mitchell and the NIU Philharmonic playing part of Ralph Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (from September 2005):