Pure Evil

Evil, at its worst, is ineffable. In the weeks and months to come, yesterday’s cold-blooded shooting rampage at Virginia Tech will be analyzed ad nauseam by every credentialed authority from every conceivable angle. A procession of talking heads will use this tragedy as a heuristic springboard for their pet theories about videogames, adolescent disaffection, race, gun-control, mental illness, religious faith, the endemic violence of the American psyche, you name it.

Indeed, the cheapening psychobabble has already begun, as just hours after the shootings, CNN and MSNBC are airing interviews with professional psychiatrists who prattle on about “alienation.” As if alienation could explain why a man felt licensed to execute 33 innocent people on a foggy April morning, killing not only his ex-girlfriend but an indiscriminate heap of young students and professors.

No, alienation cannot explain such a callous indifference for the human life and the human community which he so savagely and so easily tore apart, using nothing more than 9 and 22 millimeter handguns.

There will be time for discourse later. For now, a visibly shaken Charles Steger, president of Virginia Tech, can only say that he is “at a loss for words.” Senator John Warner (R-VA), exuding his usual gravitas, calls these crimes “senseless” and “incomprehensible.” Bush, always the ineffective orator, talks about the importance of keeping faith in “a loving God.” But in the face of such a pointless and cruel squandering of human life, his theodicy is unconvincing. The question seems trite until a tragedy like this strikes: “How could a benevolent God allow this to happen?”

Soon, other, more pertinent questions will have to be answered, too. For instance, how was it that the state police and Virginia Tech authorities allowed two hours to pass between the initial shootings (of the suspect’s ex-girlfriend and a resident advisor) and the mass slaughter that occurred in Norris Hall? Why was the university so slow in notifying students to stay inside and away from windows? Do we need better emergency alert systems on university campuses? And why was no one able to stop the shooter before the causalities mounted? Did the state police respond adequately to the situation?

But all these logistical questions will never satisfy our insatiable desire to know why. Why would someone do something so terrible? Like Shakespeare’s Iago, the literary embodiment of evil, the Virginia Tech murderer has frustrated our demand for a motive by taking his own life: “Demand me nothing; what you know, you know; from this time forth I will never speak a word.” What we know from yesterday’s massacre is nothing, except the brute, inscrutable fact that evil exists in the world.

This tragedy has left me vacillating between sadness and a wrenching sickness in my stomach. It has made me think about how fragile our communities are, how vulnerable even to random and solitary predators, let alone organized terrorists. At the same time, it has also reinvigorated my faith in another, much-maligned community: the digital one.

Coming from Virginia, I know dozens of students at Tech. I found out about the attack from a flurry of online instant messagers most to the effect of “This is so fucked up…are you following this?” I scrambled to contact everyone I knew, even people with whom I had lost touch.

Thankfully, everyone I know is okay, but of course friends have lost friends. My ex-girlfriend was a few floors above the first shooting. My brother’s friend was shot in the leg. Some reported jumping out buildings or leaving just in the nick of time.

Testament to our changed time, I barely watched the TV coverage, I trolled through facebook groups that had sprung up, read people’s away messages. Girls mostly had “thoughts and prayers;” guys had terse, profanity-littered philosophical statements about the world. The one that stuck with me, from a friend at the University of Virginia, read: “It’s one of those days that makes you realize the things that really matter and those that don’t.”



David L. Golding ‘08, a Crimson editorial editor, is an English and American literature and language concentrator in Dunster House.