by Geoff Weed

Created on: April 17, 2008

We sat in class one day and they told us about the new warning system. Those words have stuck with me because of their ludicrous nature. "Warning system." For what?

And here we are, all of us, a society paralyzed with fear. In my classroom there were several students who were noticeably shaken by the concept that, at any minute, armed individuals might march into the room and begin to summarily execute people. None of them seemed to contemplate the equally likely idea that a tractor-trailer might come barreling off of the nearby freeway and into our classroom, killing us all in a firestorm of diesel fuel and truck exhaust. Or that we might all die in some unrealized nuclear exchange.

How is it that we've let ourselves become so terribly afraid?

What happened at Virginia Tech, when a forgettable, mentally unstable person acted out his sociopathic tendencies, is one of those terrible flukes in life that is almost unbelievable. What happened at Columbine was the same. Each school shooting, in fact, is a tragic, shocking event. Every violent death that occurs is terrible, horrifying, and nearly unimaginable.

Which is the problem. Such things are extremely difficult to forget. But we need to forget. Not about the loved, wonderful people that were taken from us, because they must always be remembered and honored. Our fear, however, does require forgetting. To live in fear each day is an awful thing. It's something that robs a person of the most fundamental of human rights, the right to pursue happiness. And happiness is something unattainable when you're trapped in the wake of such terrible fright.

In the end, what is the point of the fear? America is a country in which over 300 million human beings reside. In its worst historical massacres, its veritable bloodbaths, only rarely have any more than a dozen people been killed. Which is not to minimize the impact of those murders.

Instead, it is to minimize the impact that the murderers have had on us. There are not that many evil people in the world. In fact, maybe no one is actually evil, but only a product of their environment and genetics. Either way, most of us are basically good. Which is important. But, what's even more important is the fact that those who are hell-bent on doing bad to others can never really touch us. They might, from time to time, lash out in their fear and hurt and take a few of us. But, as a group, we're safe in our numbers, our resolve, and our common decency.

Too many people forget that. The only real way that murderers can ever achieve anything on a grand scale is by society allowing them to change it. When we buy into the fear, we buy into their plans. When they installed a warning system for gunman on campus, what were they doing if not legitimizing the situation and acknowledging our collective fear and weakness.

I, for one, am not afraid that someone will gun me down in class. Which is not to say that it can't happen. On the contrary, it certainly is possible. But, no matter what, I'd have to say that I'd like to enjoy whatever minutes on this Earth remain to me rather than to spend them wondering about the fashion in which I'll eventually leave it.

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