By Paul Retain
Buffalo, NY – Soon after I learned of the killing of the students at Virginia Tech who were in their morning classes, I began to think about the mother in Baghdad, or Karbala, or in any number of other cities in Iraq. I thought about how she would feel when she heard the news of the killings in Virginia. She would think of the mothers of the students, saying to herself: "Yes, I know how you feel. I know your pain. I, too, have felt it."
To have lost a child - to have lost all of the potential and promise, all of the hopes and dreams - she would understand how the mothers, and the fathers, of the Virginia Tech students feel, because she had been there. Her son and daughter, simply doing the everyday things they were supposed to be doing to make what they could out of their lives - suddenly dead.
Wanton, indiscriminate violence - weapons, improvised explosive devices, suicide bombers, or a crazed student who kills others before his own suicide - with what awful consequences.
Virginia Tech is not far away from us and we know students and professors just like the ones in their morning classes whose lives abruptly were ended, without any reason that they should be the ones to die. So we feel pain - not the way the mothers and fathers, wives, husbands, and lovers feel the pain of those deaths. And few of us can fully know that pain the way many mothers in Iraq know it. But there are some in our community who know it; mothers at the vigils - each marking another murder on Buffalo's East Side - they know that pain.
We wonder what we can do. Are we helpless? Is there nothing we can do to reduce the level of violence, in Baghdad and elsewhere throughout Iraq, in the schools across the U.S. where shooters appear and begin to shoot, here on the streets of Buffalo?
We wonder, how easy was it for the Virginia Tech student to get the guns and ammunition that he used? Much too easy. Surely he was desperate and crazed to do what he did, but what would his desperation have driven him to do if he had not been able to get hold of his weapons? What pain to mothers would he have caused? Much less, of that we can be sure.
So what can we do to lower the level of violence here in Buffalo, across the U.S., and in Iraq? Do we have to sit by and watch and do nothing? Are we helpless? I, alone, am. But, am I alone in being appalled by the violence? No. I don't think I am. Together we are not helpless. Of course, we can't entirely prevent people becoming crazed and doing terrible things. But, together, through our representative government, we can enact legislation that would limit the likelihood of violence here at home and limit access to the tools of the most awful violence. We can encourage legislation that would reduce the desperation felt by too many about the hopelessness of their lives, that could improve education, that could provide much more equitable opportunity. Depending on who we vote into office, we can also limit the likelihood of our government sending our armed forces off on unprovoked ventures of violence. We are not helpless.
Listener-Commentator Paul Reitan is an emeritus professor at the University at Buffalo.
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