The UW Chronicles: Volume XXIIV: The Significance of Windy Days

I was running yesterday, to relieve my stress and overcome some of the emotion that was welling inside me after the tragedy at Virginia Tech, and I noticed something. The wind whipped my hair and worked against me as I jogged along Lake Washington, it whipped the trees just like it had the night my dad died, nearly six years ago, it whipped like this when a young man's body was found on campus last year, it whipped like this, my mom told me, after my cousin Matthew passed. And it whipped the trees into a dark frenzy as clouds began to move from the west and loom over my last quarter mile. The wind must have been pulling the souls from Virginia to wherever they needed to be, with family and friends and strangers like me.

As I walked back to the dorms, a police cruiser slowed and glided along with me, then past McMahon and down the street. My roommate Meaghan's eyes were pricked with tears yesterday when I came home from class to hear the body count, 33 fellow students and professors stolen from their families and their dreams, and, we all shuddered at the thought, from completing their majors, from going out into the world and being the adults they wanted to be.
What if this happened to us? Just last week a man shot his ex-girlfriend and then himself at Gould Hall, the architecture building on campus while I was at my morning's first class. What if he had decided to take out people all across campus because he no longer had anything to lose? A scary thought and too much for us to comprehend.

I watched the news and found politicians and interest groups already spouting who should be blamed, why if their policy was passed this wouldn't have happened. I grew indignant at their rants and scapegoating and let loose an outburst when a news anchor called the shooter a 'terrorist' when I was explaining the situation to my roommate, Patricia, who hadn't heard the news. Her surprise at both what had happened and my uncharacteristic eruption of anger calmed me, and made me realize that I was sick and tired of people pinning blame on everything and hijacking tragedies for their own use.

The only place blame deserves to land is the young man who killed thirty two of his fellow students. He was a young man whose own life must have been horrific and painful and for whom human life must have been cheap to do such a thing as kill his peers and teachers and then himself on a quiet school day at Virginia Tech.