We are better than we think, and not quite what we want to be

Anyone who knows me knows that I love Virginia Tech. Not just the football team, not just the drill field, not just the Hokie Bird, but all of it. It’s a love that comes from somewhere I don’t understand completely, and it’s not easy to explain to others. Those who have attended Tech know what I’m talking about: There’s something about the place, about Blacksburg, about the campus, about the students & faculty, and about the atmosphere that gets into your blood. It happened to me 20 years ago and has never left. It’s reflected in my clothes. (Sage has said you know you’re a Hokie when you have three loads of wash: whites; darks; and orange & maroon.) It’s reflected in the stickers on my car. It’s reflected in my football season tickets. And it’s reflected in how I relate to the school. No matter if I’m talking about the basketball team trying to make the Sweet 16 or the English department moving their offices out of Williams Hall, I’ve always referred to it as “we”. We’re ranked 38th in the latest US News College rankings. We need a new quarterback. We should really have more Hokie Stone in campus buildings. Virginia Tech is a place that I have always felt comfortable returning to. Sitting on top of the War Memorial, overlooking the drill field, watching students play soccer or ultimate Frisbee, watching the sun set over the duck pond. I’ve always considered it a place of reassurance. A place of peace. And on Monday that peace was shattered.

There is no way I could comprehend the pain and anguish the families and friends of the shooting victims must be going through, and I’m not even trying to relate my pain to theirs. How the loved ones of those who died are making it through this time is beyond me. But one thing that has impressed me in this awful time is the resiliency and strong bonds the current crop of VT students have shown to the University. When the media outlets bombarded the school administrators, trying to lay blame for not locking down the school after the first shooting, the students and community didn’t start pointing fingers. They drew themselves together and resolutely stood behind their school. I’ve seen some mentions in the media about how close-knit the school is with the community, and it has always been that way. Whereas a school like Maryland is very much a commuter school, Virginia Tech has a very large on-campus population. It’s not unusual for kids to stay on campus all four years, and even those who move off campus stay in Blacksburg. During my time at Tech I didn’t know of one person who even commuted from Christiansburg, which is only 10 minutes down the road. Living off campus meant you were often still within walking distance to campus (some of my friends who lived off campus had shorter walks to their classes than I did living on campus), and it makes the town and university linked together in a distinctly unique way.

Monday night, putting myself through the horror that the media outlets revealed, I felt almost as sick and pained as I’ve ever felt in my life. It hurts for all of the reasons that I mention above, but also because everything the media talks about is so familiar. When someone talks about living in West AJ, I don’t need someone to tell me that stands for Ambler Johnston. When I see a map online showing Norris Hall highlighted, I know that they’ve labeled the building incorrectly. (Half of the building is Norris, the other half is Holden.) I watch as Professor Lucinda Roy comes on the news to discuss the shooter’s disturbing ramblings in her creative writing class, and I remember when I had Dr. Roy for creative writing, and how she made us swing our arms and recite Shakespeare if we weren’t active enough in class. I know first hand how long it would take to walk from one side of campus to the other, thinking to myself that you need to add an extra 5 minutes to walk to class if the wind is whipping on the drill field. Watching the images of the campus I know so well, I couldn’t help but think back to my time as an undergrad and the classes I took in Norris Hall; of all the times I’ve walked those halls and spent time in those classrooms. And I couldn’t help but remember another time and place; a school shooting that I was much closer to once.

It was the fall of 1985, and I was a junior at Concord High School in New Hampshire. I remember being in my first class of the day, English with Doc Blanchard. About 5 minutes before the bell was about to ring an announcement came over the PA telling us to stay in our rooms, even after the bell rang. We had no idea what was going on, but as time passed on we all started to get a bit nervous as to what could be causing the delay. After 30 minutes or so, another teacher came to our room and told Mr. Blanchard that a student was downstairs (right below our room), outside the main office, with a gun, holding a kid hostage. We were all pretty shocked – this was more than 10 years before Columbine, before Jonesboro, before Red Lake, Minnesota. We barely had time to talk about what might happen when we heard 3-4 gun shots in rapid succession. We found out later that the student had brought a shotgun to school, had poked his head in and out of a few classes before finally taking up a spot outside the office. A teacher of his tried to talk him into dropping his gun and giving himself up while the local police took positions in a nearby stairwell. At one point the shooter pointed the gun directly at the teacher, and the police fired, killing him. No one else was hurt, but being young and foolish I don’t think I ever took the event that seriously. Or I should say, I never thought at the time that I was ever in danger. While there was a small amount of media attention in the days immediately after the shooting, it was soon forgotten as our school had other upcoming events to get ready for. One of our teachers, Christa McAuliffe, was only a few months away from becoming the first teacher in space. The Challenger disaster engulfed our school for the rest of the year, and in the fall I happened to meet a young woman named Sage Ingham, and the Concord High School shooting of 1985 drifted farther and farther away from my memory. But on Monday I thought of it again, and of West Nickel Mines Amish School, and of Columbine High School, and wondered if this senseless gun violence will ever end.

It’s obvious that Cho Seung-Hui was an incredibly disturbed individual. Like myself, he was an English major at Tech, and his “loner” status is a label people easily could have applied to me as well. My first semester in Blacksburg wasn’t a lot of fun. I was pretty shy and not very good at meeting new people and making new friends. I had an upper-class roommate who had plenty of his own friends that he hung out with, I was away from Sage (before the days of email and IMs, twice a week long distance phone calls were all we had), and really felt completely lost. I ended up going for long walks at all hours of the day or night. Whether it was walking around campus between classes, or going around the backstreets of town at 2 am, I’d be off on my own almost all the time to try to clear my head and try to figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. Basically, I was an 18 year old kid. But after a couple of months, hanging around with folks from Barringer Hall a little bit at a time, I realized that most of them felt much the same way I did. We were all pretty lost, but we figured out being lost together can help get you through the days. I remember one night I was going back to my dorm after another long walk, and some kids from O’Shag Hall were sitting in a stairway window, tossing bottles and other stuff onto the sidewalk as I walked by. They weren’t aiming for me exactly, but just goofing off, trying to get close enough to scare people. I came back to the dorm and ran into a few folks hanging out, and I mentioned it to them. One turned to me and said, “Well, let’s go get them…they can’t be doing that to someone from our dorm!” We didn’t, but I think it was at that moment that I felt like I wasn’t on my own any more; that I belonged to a part of a community, an extended family, that would be there for me when I needed them. I only wish Cho could have found a similar comfort. I know it was there if he only tried to find it.

Throughout all this tragedy, through all the media saturation, I’ve found myself becoming even more proud of being a Hokie than I ever have. I can’t believe the maturity that the students have shown through all of this adversity. There is no way I would have the composure and be as articulate as many that have been interviewed have been. I worry that the school will forever be remembered for this shooting and nothing else, in the same way Kent State has yet to shake off the stigma of the National Guard shooting in 1970. I worry that prospective students won’t want to attend Virginia Tech now. I worry that when I meet someone and they find out I’m a big Virginia Tech fan the first question out of their mouth will be, “Did you know anyone who was killed?” And I have much anxiety over going back to Blacksburg and the Virginia Tech campus for the first time since the shooting. It’ll be on September 1, the first game of the football season at Lane Stadium. It will be hard treking across the drill field again, walking by Norris Hall, and thinking of the lives lost on Monday night. I will most likely have tears in my eyes as the Corps of Cadets play their rendition of echo taps before the game in honor of the fallen. There will no doubt be plenty of media attention around the weekend, and there will be continued questions about student safety and what the school will do to try to ensure this will never happen again. But through it all, I know we will endure. We will persevere. And we will thrive.

We are Virginia Tech.