The Virginia Tech Shootings: The Meaning of Meaninglessness

I woke my husband to ask him why it wasn't bothering him. He said "because it was random." I thought about that and fell asleep. He’s a high school teacher at a large school with gang activity. I asked him yesterday what he would do if a kid came into his class with guns blazing. He said "I have no idea," and changed the subject. Somehow that struck me as healthy. He doesn’t want to have a plan. It’s random.

After 9/11, we heard from the Right Wing that the War on Terror was beginning, and from the Left Wing that the chickens were coming home to roost. Neither of these made any sense to me. One side was saying “It’s them!” and the other was saying “It’s us!” as if two hemispheres of the same mind were having an argument. That will happen again with these shootings. It’s as if our subconscious is having a battle to determine our level of responsibility. People, like the shrill commentators I’m guessing are dominating the airwaves, hide their fear and sadness behind anger and recrimination. There is no way to explain a person flying an airliner into the World Trade Center.  And there is certainly no way to explain a young man killing thirty-two people.

Like 9/11, the shootings at Virginia Tech were absurd, and therefore devoid of deeper meaning. The definition of “absurd” is “having no rational or orderly relationship to human life.” This does not mean that we shouldn’t act to reduce the likelihood of it happening again, but it does mean that we waste our time trying to make sense of this and, in the process, add a lot of turmoil to our lives. Many, like the late Kurt Vonnegut, would say that life itself is absurd. It certainly seems that way sometimes. But even Vonnegut found rhyme and reason to this world. As he wrote in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater: “Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’” When a person violates that rule so obscenely, he’s entered the realm of the absurd.