Unthinkable

While heading to a meeting this morning I walked past a TV tuned to CNN. I glanced up at the screen and saw the breaking news headline of “Shooting at Va. Tech. 2 students dead.” And my initial thought was “Another engineer lost it” and I just kept on walking. I didn’t even break stride.

That may not be the most callous thing I have ever done in my life but it is pretty high on the list. I’m disgusted with myself for that. I can’t even be bothered to take five seconds to look at what became the worst shooting in US history. All I can do is pass it off with a flippant comment to myself. Talk about having your priorities in entirely the wrong place. I know that it was an event far away that I couldn’t impact but still, I should at least have the decency to react.

My heart goes out to everyone at Virginia Tech. I can’t imagine what it is like to be walking to class and seeing police officers with weapons drawn charging the engineering building while gunshots ring out all around you. It is so far removed from anything that you can ever experience. I’m not even sure if you react with fear. You might just act as if it is a movie in the same way that the one student pulled out his cel phone and started filming it. It seemed as normal a response as any. You can’t believe what is happening around you so you put it on a video screen, an environment where it does make sense.

The other point I want to talk about is the comment I made to myself, which while flippant has a heck of a lot of truth to it. Now I don’t know much about what happened other than the news stories that I have seen so far (and I’ve been avoiding CNN due to a fear that I’ll have to listen to Nancy Grace be an idiot for an hour straight) so I have no idea if the shooter was an engineer or associated with the engineering program. But, the shooting did take place in the engineering building and Virginia Tech is an engineering school and I have a serious issue with the way that engineering programs tend to be run.

Being an engineer is a tough major. I’m not speaking just in terms of coursework or subject matter. Architects always seemed to work longer hours than engineers and there are other majors that definitely aren’t simple. But there is something about the engineering side of campus that makes things worse. You have a group of guys who entered the program mainly because they enjoy working with numbers more than working with people. And it really is a group of guys, I had several classes where there was not a single female in the class. Everyone in the room was one of the smartest, if not the smartest person, in their high school. And suddenly, half of them are for the first time in their life going to be below average.

Dealing with that shift is insanely difficult. Being twenty years old is tough enough, discovering that the one thing that has made you different, the one thing that set you apart from others, isn’t there anymore can break you. I pretty much shut down at one point my junior year after I bombed a test after spending the entire weekend studying for it. I just couldn’t accept the fact that even though I did everything I could, spent Saturday night studying like crazy, I just could not get the answers to the questions. That had never happened to me before. I remember lying in bed thinking that the next day I was just going to walk into the administration office, admit that I was an idiot, and find another major. And this was because I got a C on a test.

I made it through thanks to some good friends who would hit the bars with me, Heather’s kindness in sitting and having coffee with me and just listening to me, and one call from the angel in my life who has a habit of showing up whenever I need her. But I don’t think it needs to be that hard or that cutthroat. I was told in my first big engineering lecture, “Look to your left, look to your right, those people won’t be here when you graduate.” I don’t take that to be a good thing. It’s not that I want to see curriculums lessened or an “Everyone is an A student” mentality. I’d just like to see a little more care taken up front in letting people know that they are not always going to be the best and that is not always a bad thing. Something to help people cope with the stress.

Again, my thoughts and prayers are with those in Blacksburg. As I remember hearing a priest say in 2001 at ND, “At times like this, all you can do is pray.”