Ever since the Virginia Tech massacre happened and I've been meaning to blog about it. However, whenever I sit myself to do that, I am taken back to the day the very same thing happened at Dawson college in Montreal. I remember crossing the road, walking into my building and then suddenly being pushed by some lunatic woman who was screaming at me not to go out again. Yes, I admit she wasn't a lunatic, only someone who had just heard a gunshot, knew it was a gunshot, and wanting to protect the people around her. I went up to my buildings' terrace, and for almost an hour, I was dumbstruck with what i saw taking place right in front of my eyes. The cops where there, the ambulance, people you could hear screams, you could see people running, cops trying to surround the place, media choppers flying about, TV cameras everywhere... I swear, if I did not know any better, that could have been a scene from a movie. Yet, it wasn't. That day, a young man decided to go into Dawson and shoot people. Last week, the same thing happened in another part in North America. It happened a few years back at Columbine, at the Amish school, in Montreal at the Polytechnic, and it will happen again.
The question is: Why? What gives any man, woman or teenager a right to walk into a place of education, hold up a gun, and shoot someone? More importantly, what drives that person to do it? What anger, grief, hostility, shattered dreams and hope lies within them?
Another thought that crossed my mind is, who are the real victims here? Are they only the students/teachers/staff/visitors at the colleges and schools, or are they the shooters themselves? Who should we blame? The media, society, parents, teachers, fellow students, movies, games, reality?
One last thought I had is that even on the land that prises itself on being democratic and free, even on a land that prises itself for being acceptable of all societies, this savage act of killing takes place. What is sad is that people there do not realize that this happens in countries at war all the time. it happens in Palestine, Darfur, Uganda, Afghanistan, Iraq... and the list could go on for so much longer. Is it not time for the world to decide that saving younger generations is more important than some silly power struggle? Is it not time to stop manufacturing and selling weapons. Is it not about time to set a good example for this generation, the next one and all the others to come?
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