"Let not our own darkness conquer us"

Jesus Christ, inner Light,
Let not our own darkness conquer us.
Jesus Christ, inner Light,
Enable us to welcome Your love.

--Suzanne Toolan, RSM

That song was to have been the signature text for tonight's Taizé service at my parish. It will now be one of the signature texts for a combined Taizé service and healing vigil there. It's also, I would argue, one of the better messages to take away from the horrible events at Northern Illinois University yesterday.

What we know now:

• Seven Six people are dead: six five students and the gunman, tentatively identified as Stephen Kazmierczak.
• Fifteen people were wounded. Several remain in local hospitals or area trauma centers.
• The gunman was enrolled at NIU in the spring semester 2007 as a sociology major. He was enrolled this semester as a graduate student in social work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. According to NIU Police Chief Donald Grady at a press conference this morning, Kazmierczak was on some kind of (presumably prescription) medication for an unspecified illness. He apparently stopped taking that medication some time ago, and his behavior "became erratic" in the last two weeks.
• Kazmierczak drove to campus yesterday, parked near Cole Hall, and carried a guitar case containing the shotgun, and three handguns and ammunition clips under his coat. It is not known how long he was on campus before beginning the shooting.
• According to Supervisory Special Agent Kevin Cronin of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the shooter had a valid FOID card and was not legally barred from owning or purchasing guns. Completed traces on two of the weapons (a Remington 870 12-gauge shotgun and a Glock 9mm pistol) indicate that they were purchased legally from a gun dealer in Champaign (who was not named) on February 9.
• The shooter did not bring a note or any kind of message with him to campus. As of yet, no motive for the shootings has been determined.

There has already been a great deal of rhetoric about this shooting. The very first message on the Tribune's web page devoted to the shootings was something to the effect that if NIU hadn't been a gun-free zone, the shootings might not have happened. A recommended diary at Daily Kos last night was calling for more gun control regulations. A number of parents have been asking how the university could let something like this happen to their students. Plenty of people have been asking why we continue to have events like this one.

For now at least, I'm calling bullshit on all of that junk. Right now, the NIU community doesn't need politicians or pundits using events on our campus to pimp for their preferred positions (whatever those positions might be). We don't need frightened people telling us we should have done this, or should not have done that. There will be ample time for recriminations, dissections, discussions, and legislation. Right now we need exactly what we've been getting from all over the United States and the world--support, whether in the form of condolences, messages of sympathy, thoughts, prayers, and well-wishes, or in more concrete terms like the provision of extra counselors by area colleges and universities and community agencies. As NIU President John G. Peters said in this morning's press conference, the NIU community--faculty, staff, students, and their families--will get through this thing together. And we'll do it with a little help from our friends.

What we emphatically don't need is to let "our own darkness" get the better of us. It would be easy to use yesterday's tragedy as the starting point for a whole chain of draconian measures; measures that, while they might look good and might make at least a few people feel temporarily safer, would in fact do little to remedy any of the actual problems that contributed to the tragedy. Neither do we want to let yesterday's events, horrific though they were, prevent us from going about our regular routines. It will be difficult to walk on campus near Cole Hall, and more difficult still to go to class in the lecture hall where the shootings took place. But we must and should do so, to reclaim that space for our use and for the uses it was intended to serve.

It was said in many places yesterday, including the local bar where I met up with one of my fellow history graduate students for a few pints of Guinness, that if anyplace on earth should be safe, it should be a college classroom. But, as President Peters noted yesterday and again this morning, short of putting armed guards on every door to every building at every public institution across the country, there is no way to guarantee that kind of safety. To borrow a phrase from the second-season opener of The West Wing, yesterday's events, like those of last year at Virginia Tech, or the brutal murder of one student by another at my alma mater some years ago, were the work of madmen--or at the very least of individuals who were not fully compos mentis but who were determined to carry out their plans. We can't protect ourselves from that kind of individual or those kinds of plans--and we're only fooling ourselves if we believe otherwise: a point that the Boy Who Won't Be King Much Longer would do well to remember as he tries to frighten Congress and the American people into handing him even more power to invade our privacy and erode our freedoms. If we live our lives in fear of what may happen, can we really be said to be living at all?

Meanwhile, life at NIU--and the life of NIU--goes on. Irrevocably altered from what that life looked like yesterday, yes. But onward all the same. It has been suggested that people who are able wear the university's colors (cardinal and black) to show their support, as we did with the orange and black after Virginia Tech. For those of you of a more spiritual bent, there will be the aforementioned Taizé/healing service tonight at 7:30 p.m., and a candlelight vigil on campus at 9 p.m. Join us if you can, and send your good thoughts, well-wishes, and prayers if you can't.

Update, 12 noon. Mother of God! Those sniveling curs at Westboro Baptist, God rot their miserable souls in hell, are supposedly planning to picket at the victims' funerals. I am not a violent man, but if I catch sight of any one of them anywhere near my campus, I will do my level best to disembowel them with a dull spoon.

Comments

[ellroon]

I think I have a few dull spoons in the back of my silverware drawer. I'll have to come and help though, there's a certain technique.

I won't expound on what happened but if allowed, I'll send you a big cyber hug. Hang in there.

[Bradley]

Beautifully-written post, Michael. We'll be thinking of you.