Heavy Heart

The past two days I've been carrying around a very heavy heart because of the tragic occurrences at Virginia Tech. My only (very nebulous) connection to the losses is the knowledge that the father of one of the slain professors is a well-known science fiction writer, and I know some people (via the internet) who know this writer. However as a mother, as a person who abhors violence, I can't get the story out of my head. So much grief in one place. I visited the website of the professor, Jamie Bishop, who was also an artist and photographer, and very talented (the site is www.memory39.com). Such loss, such waste.

Yesterday afternoon there was a bomb threat at my daughter's junior high school. It turned out to be a false alarm, but the students were evacuated to another neraby school (where I happened to be volunteering in the library at the time). They had to leave all their belongings and evacuate as quickly as possible, then walk to safety in the cold. It was upsetting, of course. Does no-one even contemplate the consequences of their actions? How have so many people become so dissociated from the notions of compassion, empathy, and social responsibility? And what can we do about it?

Someone on the radio yesterday opined that we need to be more observant, more vigilant, to see when people are exhibiting signs of mental trouble or distress so that they can be helped. This struck me as a particularly naive view. I know someone who went through a very bad time, was clinically depressed, very near to suicidal--and it was impossible for this person's family to get any help from the medical system. I know another person who is mentally unstable, living in impossible conditions and barely able to care for themselves; but there seems to be no help for this person, either. No one can "interfere," not the police, not the social welfare system. We have set up a system where other concerns override getting help for people who obviously need it. Today came the news that the perpetrator in the Virginia Tech case was indeed a person with mental problems and known to police--what more proof is needed that the "system" doesn't work. Observation was not lacking in that case--it was the ability, or possibly the will, to do something about it.

Sadly, I have no answers, but these are the questions that are on my mind today.