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THE TAO OF "I DON'T WANT TO KNOW"

My friend, Kim, called me yesterday, sometime in the afternoon. We've been friends - good friends, the best of friends - for nearly thirty years, yet we've lived most of them at least two to five states apart. She lives in Ohio, I, in California. We discuss many things, most of them having nothing to do with current events. Her daughter starts college in another state next September, her son is finishing his bachelor's and planning on going to grad school, my daughter is beginning an acting career and just got representation, Kim's ex-husband has been diagnosed with Stage 1 prostate cancer and is undergoing treatment with an optimistic prognosis. We're far too busy meddling lovingly in each other's lives to be bothered with the outside world. Sometimes, though, the world gets too big, too insistent for us to shove aside. Yesterday, the perniciousness of the world barged in and monopolized our conversation.

"I want to know who he is," she said to me, referring to the man who shot over 60 people at Virginia Tech University, killing 32, before putting a bullet in his own head on Monday.

"I don't," I responded, and even I was surprised by my certainty of it.

"Aren't you even curious?"

"I don't think so," I answered, turning my lack of desire over and over in my own head. Shouldn't I be curious? Wasn't everyone else curious? Didn't everyone else want to know?

"I just want to know why," Kim said.

Then I realized why I didn't care to know who the killer was. "Does it matter why?" I asked her. "Is there any answer that would satisfy you? Is there any abuse, any sadness, any injustice he suffered in his life that warrants what he's done?"

Now Kim was stumped. She thought for a moment and then said, "No. I suppose not." And we went on to another subject.

We didn't drop the matter because what happened at Virginia Tech wasn't more important than anything else we must have gone on to talk about (and to prove, I can't remember what we went on to talk about). We moved on because there's a futility and hopeless that pervades any discussion of such an horrific event. I think I learned my lesson on September 11th. Sure, it was bad not knowing the "whos" and "whys" of it all. But now, we know all the facts. We not only know what the terrorists wanted, we know who funded them, we know what their initial targets were, we know where they were trained and for how long, we know what they were promised and, in a few cases, what their final words were.

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