Uncomfortably numb
Sunday, February 17, 2008 at 09:29PM I was at work on Thursday - Valentine's Day - when the CNN News Alert popped into my inbox. It was about a school shooting, and, shamefully, I almost deleted it without reading any further. Because, well, because it was "just another school shooting."
As I was about to put my finger on the delete key, it caught my eye. The name of the school. Northern Illinois University. A chill ran through me. Between 1991 and 1994, NIU was my home. It was the place I learned to be the lawyer I am today.
The sad thing is, I wouldn't have read any further if I hadn't seen the name of the school on that CNN News Alert. I'm afraid we've become uncomfortably numb to tragedy.
Maybe we just don't want to believe that it can happen.
But the reality is that it does, and that it's happening more and more.
Just 12 days before the killings at NIU, 5 women were shot to death in a mall in Tinley Park, Illinois. Not far from where I grew up. One of the victims was a counselor from Homewood-Flossmoor High School. My high school.
Two mass murders, less than two weeks apart. Too close to home. Too many lives ended much too soon.
I don't know what is happening in this world, but these kinds of things just didn't happen when I was a kid. Kids didn't walk into classrooms and start shooting.
I don't know why we, as a nation, aren't talking about it. My guess is that the reason is the same reason I almost deleted that CNN News Alert. We've become numb to it. Uncomfortably numb.
I can honestly, and, shamefully, say that I didn't feel the same way about Columbine and Virginia Tech as I do about Northern Illinois University. Because I didn't have a connection with them. I shook my head in disbelief, sure. But I wasn't shaken by them. Not the way I'm shaken now.
We've got to wake up to it. There needs to be a national dialogue on it. We can't treat these as individual cases. Not any more. It's a systemic problem that needs to be addressed, the same way that we came together after 9/11 to address terrorism. We can't hide and pretend it's going away. I wish that it would, but I don't believe that any more.
I never thought I'd see the day that one of the schools I attended would be one of "those" schools, that it would forevermore share a tragic link to those "other" schools. Columbine and Virginia Tech. Now you can add Northern Illinois University. It is one of "those" schools.
How sad. How very, very sad.
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Walt