Hook,
I have been intentionally staying away from the news--partially because it is just so miserably repetitive and partially because I now have great music to take its tawdry place. So I had not heard of this latest tragedy. You are right that it is just one of many such tragedies, but none of them are small. And you are also right that there is no sense to be made from any of them. They all remind me of one day in August, 1966. I was a student at the University of Texas at Austin. I lived in a small rooming house less than a mile from campus. As a child of the Cold War whose mother had equipped the trunk of his '58 Ford with emergency food and water during the Cuban missle crisis, I was acutely conscious of the fact that we and the Soviets had thousands of missles pointed at each other. That morning, I woke to the sound of sirens all over the city. I jumped on my bicycle and rode toward campus in case we were under attack. And we were indeed--only not from the Soviet Union. I looked up at the tower and saw what appeared to be puffs of smoke shooting up from the observation deck. Now the previous year, there had been a fire in that area and the rare books collection prior to 1920 had been in real peril. So I assumed the tower must be on fire again.
There were people hiding behind a fence looking up at the tower, and one or two of them turned to wave at me. Stupified, I remained in the middle of the intersection--until a car coming down the street had its window shot out and the driver stopped and sprinted away, leaving the car where it was. I finally got wise and ran to join the folks behind the fence--only to learn that there was someone shooting from the deck of the tower. The puffs of "smoke" were actually flying dust from limestone being hit by rifle bullets fired by the Police below. Being the rash young kid I was, I waited a while then, when activity seemed to be on the other side of the building, I ran across the main street in front of the campus. I hid behind the Architecture Building and saw a policeman running up Inner Campus Drive. Then there were shots, and I learned later he had been killed. His name was Billy Speed. I don't know why, but he is the only victim of the many that day whose name stuck with me--perhaps because I saw him so briefly just before he was snuffed out.
Later I watched as they carried Charles Whitman down from the tower--what was left of him. It was later revealed that he had told one of the Health Center doctors that he was having visions of going up on the tower with a deer rifle and shooting people. It was a small town in those days, Austin, and I happened to have met that doctor. I asked my sister in law , a psychologist, why he had not raised an alarm. She said that you would not believe how many times you would hear things like that in the course of a year. It later was said that Whitman had a brain tumor. Who knows.
So no, it is useless to try to make sense out of senseless violence--although in those days we did try. I think that must have been really the first of the true berserkers--Whitman and Richard Speck, right about the same time. Nor will any simple measures prevent things like that from happening. They are, I firmly believe, just subsets of the age-old question why bad things happen to good people. I think it is far more practical to try to make sense of the kinds of violence and threatened violence that is patently evil and intentional, and to take measures against that.
As always, the victims and the survivors of this tragedy will be in my thoughts. Thank you.
Russ
