Akimset has apparently protected me from 104 spam comments in the lifetime of this blog… I got my first spam “miss” today, which I was happy to manually tag as spam.
Way to go, Akimset. 
More people (read: Alvin) should incorporate this automagic protection into their blogs.
…
C’mon, Alvin. Use that prophylactic.
-TJ
Good morning.
After reading Law’s post on the VT massacres (here) I was half-surprised that I came to the exact same conclusion myself, as far as the predicatable, what-could-we-have-done-better nature of the crime and the attempted scapegoating that followed.
First and most importantly, Rest In Peace to all the people killed at VT. My prayers go out to the dead, and to the family and friends of slain VT students and staff that now have to figure out a way to live out the rest of their lives without their loved ones.
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Ladies and Gentlemen, the only thing we can figure from all this senseless violence is that it was senseless. There is no rhyme or reason to this kind of tragedy. How do you predict that which is irrational? IMO you don’t, you grieve when it happens, accept what has passed, and try to move on. It may sound heartless or unsympathetic, but really what can you do? This is a senseless killing. I see this as some guy flipping a coin, and commit to shooting if it lands on its side. This time, the coin landed on its side.
I think if anything–if anything–we can say we should have recognized the signs beforehand, what with all the disturbing work he produced for his classes, the plays, the poems… and the only thing one can do at that point is refer to a therapist. Some people are just fucked up… I personally don’t think all people who are fucked up and write about fucked up things and say fucked up shit are going to become mass murderers. But if anything we can attempt treat this like the Air Force treats suicide. If an Airman starts talking about killing themselves, we refer them to Life Skills and immediately attempt to build a support group for that person. Similarly, perhaps we should start referring people who talk about committing murder to a Life Skills-type of therapist. It would help by giving the troubled person a much-needed talking to and working with, and when word gets around that you get sent to a therapist for talking like that, people who are just talkers will be less likely to fuck around when it comes to talking about murder, the same way that people around here don’t joke about killing themselves anymore, since it’s well known (we’re trained on suicide prevention measures) that doing so will land a dude in Life Skills.
As far as blame goes, this is a random act of violence from a sick individual. These things just happen. You can only grieve for the dead, then try to move on. The University handled this situation to the best of their ability correctly… For people in charge of security, the first instinct is to make the right area safe. In this case, it was the dorm. From the indicators and the experience of the police, it looked like an isolated shooting given all the evidence they scrambled to find.
I don’t know. As with every tragedy that I witness (albeit third-hand), I scramble to make sense of the senseless, no matter how much I realize that it’s impossible to do so, and I imagine others out there react the same way. I guess it’s the humanity in us, where instead of saying “Well, these things just happen”, we’re driven and compelled to find ways not to let these kinds of tragedies happen again. We figure out how to prevent future building bombings, how to stop bombs from being sent to the mail, how to prevent our airplanes being used as missiles to kill people, how to stop kids from going on shooting rampages at an assumed-safe place….
I guess we just need time to accept what has happened and move on.
-TJ
Well it’s been a hell of a last couple of days here for me. Last Friday I took leave to go back home for Lawrence and Cookie’s wedding, and I have to say I had a blast. I saw almost all of my friends, the same ones I see whenever I go home (Alvin, Scott, Kyuu Hee… didn’t see Jieqi this time, not enough time I guess. Sorry J.)
One of the things I want to mention before I forget is that I have some protected posts here, and if you want to read them you’re supposed to ask me for access… for some reason you guys mentioned to me at one point or another that you couldn’t read my protected posts… well you never asked for access! It’s me, man! If you’re reading this blog on a somewhat regular basis, then it’s 95% likely you have my phone number, so just give me a call! Or IM, or something.
Anyway, as usual I had a bunch of deep conversations with various folks while I was home. Maybe they didn’t think them deep, but I did, because at least they got me thinking. Everyone’s getting married, everyone’s growing up… Kyuu Hee mentioned to me in passing “Thomas, can you believe it? We’re already grown up!” To which I replied “Hell no, I’m not a grownup.” She agreed with me vocally when I said it, and I think (correct me if I’m wrong, Kyuu Hee) that she mentally agreed with me too, at least to a degree. I’m not grown up, and I don’t think I’ll be grown up until a couple more years… not until after I’ve held a respectable job–not that being in the military is respectable, but it really is almost a waste of my capabilities… and I can’t go further into detail on what I actually do. Sorry…–dated and had a steady longer-than-six-months relationship with a respectable girl, and probably most importantly have completed a number of things I wanted to get out of the way before becoming a “grown-up”, such as get through grad school, and finish my time in the military honorably and having contributed something to the betterment of our national security.
Well I got back yesterday, and I would have spent today trying to sleep for my night shift, but there was an important function I had to attend, namely the funeral of Tyrone Hubbard, MSgt, USAF (Ret). I won’t claim to have known him well, as I knew him through a fellow APHA member MSgt Hubbard aka “Tita Ching” (First name not shown, since I didn’t ask her permission to put her name here). I met him only twice or three times last year, and knew that he was going through chemo for his cancer. Anyway, I spent today, two days after my best friends’ wedding, mostly thinking about death, the meaning of life–alot more than usual, that is–and how I want my friends and family to respond to my death when it comes. I always thought that if I ever lost someone important, that I don’t think I would cry, because in my heart I know that God takes them to live with Him in Heaven… and this isn’t some religious hoohah that I’m spouting, but what I truly, honestly believe. I take great comfort that I will see Mr. Hubbard again, as well as my high school friend Lisa Liu (d. 1998), my cousin Matthew Aragon (d. 1997), my old music teacher David Falconer, my great-grand uncle Bonifacio Lapidario, my 8th grade science teacher Gin Pooler, my great-grand uncle whom I only knew as “Lolo Sunday” who my mom always tells me was so proud of me and talked about me constantly even though I only knew him for a few months when I was 10 years old, and–Lord forgive me–but others that have gone on that I can’t remember at the moment. To me, after the body dies, the body is just an empty home, as the soul has moved out to a better place, with an infinite number of infinitely large bedrooms, bathrooms, and living rooms. Already I picture Mr. Hubbard checking out his new digs, walking around with a strength he probably hasn’t had in at least a couple of months, maybe even running into people he knew in life that had passed on before him, perhaps even my friends and people I’ve known that have already been living there for a while. Lord, I wish I could make a movie of what I am seeing in my head right now, or an explorable space of my conceptualization of what Heaven must be like… I imagine it to be like Second Life, except with no ads, no lag, and every add-on and imagined space is high-quality product using infinite polygons to render everything… where you can do whatever you want, whenever you want, for the rest of time.
Back to Earth, though, I was called at about 9:15AM this morning as I was getting ready to go to the church service here on base, another friend Abigayle said that Tita Ching wanted me to operate a camera to film the whole ceremony. Of course I accepted without hesitation, but it’s kinda strange to film this whole thing, because now instead of being a member of the congregation, I had to watch with a strange kind of clarity this whole ceremony unfold, and I tried my best to watch the ceremony, and capture as little of the grieving as I could, because they have two children together and both were crying a bit here and there, as well as Tita Ching and others in the congregation… I tell you, if I cry at a funeral as I almost did today, it’s not because the person in the casket has died and I personally won’t be able to say “hello” to him in this lifetime. No, I’ll cry because when someone else is grieving, you feel their pain, and it’s so powerful that the emotion seems to radiate from their body and manifest in those around them. Of course, grieving with others makes the process easier, but best believe when I saw Tita Ching and her children cry, my throat swelled into a knot and for a moment I grieved with them from behind the camera.
But I maintain, even now, that funerals can be events where no one cries, and where everyone celebrates and laughs. I remember as a teenager when I went to my cousin Matthew’s funeral… he had passed due to a gun accident at home, so it was very sudden and I had trouble dealing with this my first death of someone relatively close to me. After his funeral and when we were at his home, my mom had me approach some of Matthew’s friends, and they were all smiling in a sad way but trying their best to celebrate his life. Of course, I was a dumbass kid back then, and it confused the hell out of me as to why they were smiling when they should be utterly destraught at the passing of their friend, the way I was. But it makes sense to me now, when a person leaves this world, they leave a world of pain, a world where some of us live cold and alone on the street, or stricken with an illness that leaves them immobile and unable to communicate or hear and see their loved ones… a world where evil does have a foothold, currently in the form of terrorists, criminals, power-hungry politicians, forces that drive up the cost of living, ignorance, duplicity, and all other maner of unfortunate elements that make us the imperfect creatures that we humans are.
All that goes away upon death. You do your time here, in the name of God, and once you’ve completed your work and what your life was meant for, you retire to the Big Mansion in the Sky, playing golf with Jesus, Bob Hope, Aaliyah, and George Washington. So really, every funeral I go to from here on out, there’s always a small part of me that’s happy and thankful that they’ve passed away… in Heaven, there is no sadness, so now one more person gets to enjoy that eternal bliss.
Phew. Anyway, now it’s almost 18:30, and I have work later tonight, so I’m going to try to go to sleep. Live long and prosper. Live–and love–forever.
-TJ