The message of the Virginia Tech massacre:

We are all very vulnerable.


While parents, poets, pundits, and politicians struggle to make sense of the senseless, we all grapple with the sad reality that evil is among us and tragedy could visit us at any time.

Not encouraging words, I know, but a stark reality that, when faced with an open mind and a soul yearning for meaning, can lead one to a deeper lesson of the Virginia Tech massacre:
cherish and celebrate life while we can.

"You never know when your time is up" sounds cliched, but like many cliche's it's really a truism. We don't know when our time is up. (Excluding suicides & death row executions.) Did any of those poor souls at Virginia Tech that day think that they were going to be murdered, would never see family and friends again? Of course not. And yet, it happened to be true.

The morning of September 11, 2001 the people in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon went about their normal routines, never giving thought to the possibility of the evil that would soon visit them. It's given the phrase "...out of the blue" an all-too literal meaning.

As they dropped them off at America's Kids Day Care Center on a fine spring day in 1995, the parents of 15 children never dreamed their kids would join 153 other people as casualties, and over 800 injured, in the Oklahoma City bombing.

Even the men and women stationed at Pearl Harbor on the quiet morning of December 7, 1941 never saw it coming. Though there's debatable evidence of some in FDR's administration having some prior knowledge, the 2403 souls lost that day and the 1178 injured never foresaw that their idyllic Hawaiian morning would be so menacingly shattered. Even on a naval military base and while much of the world was already at war, somehow, they never saw it coming.

If even those who don uniform and prepare for battling evil forces can be caught so unawares, how then shall the rest of us ever be prepared for the capricious nature of random acts of violence?

As Peggy Noonan reflected in her Wall Street Journal column, "...all those big cops, scores of them, hundreds, with the latest, heaviest, most sophisticated gear, all the weapons and helmets and safety vests and belts. It looked like the brute force of the state coming up against uncontrollable human will."

Barricading oneself in a castle-like fortress and never leaving would be one approach to prepare for unforeseen violence, but hardly practical, and hardly living.

The inescapable truth is that we are all very vulnerable, nearly anywhere and at anytime, to the unpredictable actions of a lone lunatic with malicious intent. This is especially true when the element of self-preservation is absent. When a violent psychopath isn't concerned about his own safety (intends, in fact, to kill himself anyway) than no risks are too great for him to take, and our response options are limited. And this only pertains to the recognized threat anyway, if the duration of an attack even allows time for a defensive response.

The entire idea of trying to prepare for or reduce the likelihood of attacks like the one at Virginia Tech seems naively misguided, if not impossible. In the vast expanse of our United States with 300 million inhabitants, it's simply not practical for us all to be guarded against the unpredictable threat of "uncontrollable human will", even if we lived in a police state.

Rather, our time and energies should be focused on living our lives to the fullest, on embracing and celebrating life while we have it, on enriching it's value for ourselves and those around us, and contributing what we can to make our little corner of the world a better place to live. And that, in turn will help to make it a safer place, for all of us.

Brad