In Memoriam - Virginia Tech

We will continue to invent the future through our blood and tears and through all our sadness ... We will prevail ...

-- Nikki Giovanni, University Distinguished Professor, poet, activist

Been a week already and I’ve somehow been trying to avoid writing about that.

Perhaps because I haven’t quite gotten over it myself? Yes, that’s probably it.

Or because writing this article would force me to search for some more accurate data on the issue, and I can’t get myself to.

I think we’ve tried to block it out, somehow. Tried not to let the multiple reports about the murderer, how he’s been a nutcase from a while and how the medical services of his school reported him to be mentally unstable a while ago - but couldn’t really do anything about it.

How 32 people died on a university campus.

I used to believe that Universities were this perfect, holy place, protected by God and the elements. And that those who sought knowledge were somehow safe from the outside madness.

I was wrong. So damn wrong.

Virginia Tech’s ‘shooting’ - quite an understatement, I have to say - shook the nation. Students in particular took it hard, and for a reason: it’s the ‘it could happen to us’ immediate reasoning. And because pretty much everyone knew someone at V-Tech, had a classmate from Virginia, or something. It was way, way too real.

I remember Columbine, and as horrible as that was, it was completely remote from me - at 10,000 km, I guess you can afford to dissociate yourself from that.

I don’t want to go through the description of the events, I’m sure you can look it up yourself. (or you can see the WPost’s coverage here.)

Plus I don’t want to waste too much time on the killer - Cho Seung-hui was his name - because he doesn’t deserve it. I just hope he rots in hell as we speak. I won't put a photo of him either. I will, however, have a thought for his family, which felt compelled, in the midst of its grief, to declare itself 'so sorry' for the actions of their son. The guy's sister, a Princeton 'o4 (and a damn smart one, according to Taufiq who went to college with her), said that "We pray for their families and loved ones who are experiencing so much excruciating grief. And we pray for those who were injured and for those whose lives are changed forever because of what they witnessed and experienced".

Poor people. Just another family that was making its way in the US like any other immigrant family, I guess.

V-Tech itself is a state of shock, its students are only now starting to return to class.

This is what the homepage of Virginia Tech looks like:

As for the deceased, well, we lost 32 people. We, the students; we, the world. 32 lives, between students and professors. A huge, huge, inexplicable, painful, loss.

Oh, and 1 Egyptian, Waleed Shaalan is his name. Not that he’s more important than the others but to me it’s yet an extra link to the massacre, one more way for me to feel it. One more reason to cry.

On the facebook group that his roommates created, we learn that Waleed was 32, a Civil Engineering PhD student from Zagazig. He has a wife, Amira, and 1 year old child, Khaled, who were supposed to join him in the US shortly.

And here’s a little story from the NYTimes about him:

"He was gunned down on Monday while he was studying in Norris Hall, but witnesses say he died a hero.

According to Randy Dymond, a civil engineering professor at Virginia Tech, Mr. Shaalan was in a classroom with another student when the gunman entered and opened fire.

Mr. Shaalan was badly wounded and lay beside the other student, who was not shot but played dead, as the gunman returned two times searching for signs of life. Just as the gunman noticed the student, Mr. Shaalan made a move to distract him, at which point he was shot a second time and died. The student believed that Mr. Shaalan purposefully distracted the shooter to save him, Mr. Dymond said."

Not much I can add to that. And there a few stories of those, that remind us that those who died didn't deserve to die. They just simply did not fucking deserve to die, dammit!

I know that we here are starting to snap out of it, because, well, that's what people do. And that the discussion is starting to take a new turn, with investigations starting to wonder why the crazy fuck, who was diagnosed as ‘mentally ill’ a year or two ago, was let loose. Or why there was no response between the first shooting - at the dorm - and the second at the Uni, two hours later.

So we might get some answers, and some people will be removed from their functions. Well, better than nothing.

And it's on this awkward note that I end this entry.