Dean Sue A. Alexander reflects on tragedy at Virginia Tech

Wheaton College students, staff and faculty recently gathered in Cole Chapel during a memorial service for the 32 people murdered at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. During the service, Wheaton Dean of Students Sue A. Alexander reflected on the tragedy in a moving speech. Here are the words of comfort she offered:

In one of the news broadcasts following the Virginia Tech massacre, the press was interviewing a woman who was carrying flowers to the campus candlelight vigil. "The saddest thing," she said, "Is that we already know what to bring."

The first national tragedy that affected my life was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. I was a college student and in the days before the lightning speed of the internet, I still remember vividly how the nation, gripped in a paroxysm of grief, huddled around television sets for days at a time, trying to make sense of this unthinkable happening. When, several years later, within a short space of time Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were shot, we were stunned with grief but no longer surprised that the unthinkable could happen in America.

For a previous generation of college students in the 1980's, the explosion of the Challenger, carrying elementary school teacher Christa McAuliffe was the national catastrophe that caused their loss of innocence.

For your generation, it might have been Columbine in 1999: that single word has now come to symbolize so much about what we think is wrong in American society: social isolation, parental ignorance, school bullying, internet misinformation, accessibility of guns. But that horrific event was soon overshadowed by 9/11 when we learned we were vulnerable as a nation.

I recall vividly that when we gathered the campus in the Dimple to collectively grieve and try to make sense out of that cataclysm, the student voices that emerged had an underlying theme: This is a good place to be right now. This is a place where we are safe. This is a place where we can try to make sense of what is happening in the world.

But Virginia Tech may now have permeated even that feeling of safety. How could such a thing happen in the very place that espouses the very best of what America stands for--freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom for conflict and diversity? As Pogo, that philosopher possum from the Okeefenokee Swamp would say, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

Rabbi Harold Kushner, in his book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, says " a sense of meaning makes pain more bearable."

"Let me suggest that the bad things that happen to us in our lives do not have a meaning when they happen to us. They do not happen for any good reason which would cause us to accept them willingly. But we can give them a meaning. We can redeem these tragedies from senselessness by imposing meaning on them."

Kushner believes that, "Looking to the future redeems our tragedies."

He writes: "The question we should be asking is not, 'Why did this happen...?' That is really an unanswerable, pointless question. A better question would be 'Now that this has happened ..., what am I going to do about it?'"

"Martin Gray, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Holocaust, writes of his life in a book called For Those I Loved. He tells how, after the Holocaust, he rebuilt his life, became successful, married, and raised a family. Life seemed good after the horrors of the concentration camp."

"Then one day, his wife and children were killed when a forest fire ravaged their home in the south of France. Gray was distraught, pushed almost to the breaking point by this added tragedy. People urged him to demand an inquiry into what caused the fire, but instead he chose to put his resources into a movement to protect nature from future fires."

"He explained that an inquiry, an investigation, would focus only on the past, on issues of pain and sorrow and blame. He wanted to focus on the future. An inquiry would set him against other people--'was someone negligent? whose fault was it?'--and being against other people, setting out to find a villain, accusing other people of being responsible for your misery, only makes a lonely person lonelier. Life, he concluded, has to be lived for something, not just against something."

Rabbi Kushner concludes: "We too need to get over the questions that focus on the past and on the pain--'why did this happen ?'--and ask instead the question which opens doors to the future: 'Now that this has happened, what shall I do about it?'"

What does this call us to do?

First, I think it calls us to sit with our grief and fear and not hasten to cover it up by blaming anyone.

It calls us to look around us with love and concern, not fear and paranoia.

It calls us to reach out to our friends and colleagues who are in pain.

It calls us to speak up for those who cannot.

It calls us to reject any quick fixes or simplistic ways of characterizing what happened at Virginia Tech.

It calls us to be vigilant about any stereotypical characterizations that will inevitably emerge about the profile of the student who committed these murders.

The person who spoke most eloquently to the Hokies of Virginia Tech was the poet, novelist and faculty member, Nikki Giovanni, who gave this address at the campus memorial:

"We are Virginia Tech.

We are sad today, and we will be sad for quite a while. We are not moving on, we are embracing our mourning.

We are Virginia Tech.

We are strong enough to stand tall tearlessly, we are brave enough to bend to cry, and we are sad enough to know that we must laugh again.

We are Virginia Tech.

We do not understand this tragedy. We know we did nothing to deserve it, but neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS, neither do the invisible children walking the night away to avoid being captured by the rogue army, neither does the baby elephant watching his community being devastated for ivory, neither does the Mexican child looking for fresh water, neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of the night in his crib in the home his father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because the land was destabilized. No one deserves a tragedy.

We are Virginia Tech.

The Hokie Nation embraces our own and reaches out with open heart and hands to those who offer their hearts and minds. We are strong, and brave, and innocent, and unafraid. We are better than we think and not quite what we want to be. We are alive to the imaginations and the possibilities. We will continue to invent the future through our blood and tears and through all our sadness.

We are the Hokies.

We will prevail.

We will prevail.

We will prevail.

We are Virginia Tech."