some thoughts (April 16-27, 2007)

Friends, Since a number of you asked to receive further installments, I decided to send this out to everyone who wrote to offer support. I have greatly appreciated it, profoundly so. Yesterday I used the basketball court for stress relief and to connect with another group of friends. One friend, a productive scholar, said he had just arrived at the point of beginning to plan what he might try to accomplish next week. That pretty much described my head as well. I may add entries in coming weeks as thoughts and feelings spiral, but I don't know. For now I'm done. I look forward to following up individually with each of you. Warmly, Gary



Friends, I'm getting too many messages to respond individually. I'm grateful for your concern. Below is a series of messages I've been sending out to those who have contacted me.



Monday afternoon

I and my family are ok. I was in my office 3 buildings away when the mass shootings took place, about 9:45. I didn't hear the shots. I learned of the lockdown from a loudspeaker announcing an emergency.

The 2nd floor of Norris Hall is home to the engineering science and mechanics dept, as well as the dean's office for the college of engineering. I have many friends in both. I don't believe anyone in STS teaches in that building. No names have been released. I'm holding my breath.

This is beyond comprehension.

Love, gary



[Note: much later I was reminded that I have taught in Norris Hall many times, in the big lecture hall, on the other end of the building from the shootings. I know the building well.]



Tuesday AM:

One of the professors killed was my friend, G.V. Loganathan, an Indian man from civil engineering. Last year he won the University's top award for teaching. His students had written passionately about the lengths he had gone to help them, both in the classroom and beyond. He was in his classroom.

I also knew the German instructor, Jamie Bishop, a delightful, unassuming young man. He also taught courses in web design. I was enrolled in one last year as part of what is called here the Faculty Development Institute.

Dr. Librescu held the door shut in his classroom to give his students time to jump out of the window.

The loss is devastating.



Tuesday PM:

At the convocation today, a father nearly collapsed and the proceeding stopped while he received care and was helped out of the Coliseum along with his family. Nikki Giovanni, the poet, concluded the event with a wonderfully stirring call for persistence and community--but to me it's not time yet. All those families.



Wednesday AM:

I awoke thinking about how what happened here on Monday happens every day in Iraq.

The sensationalism in U.S. news coverage is becoming the story. This country seems to know what it is only when it has an enemy. Virginia Tech has lost its innocence. It's now the object of a broader search for self-definition. Today the word Columbine means one thing. Is that what's happening to Virginia Tech?



Wednesday PM:

I'm watching two things, both in others and in myself.

On the one hand, a genuine sense of questioning about the decision not to announce that a gunman was at large. I'm glad President Steger asked the governor to appoint a commission to investigate what took place. That strikes me as the right course of action.

On the other hand, a sense of being attacked by the deluge of coverage and an urge to join together to fight it off. The intrusion makes it difficult to conceptualize a new sense of community, let alone build it.



Thursday AM:

My resistance to intrusion has grown. The relentless demands for clarity in the national media have become overwhelming to me. A nation uncertain about its identity lusts for the clarity of evil, identified and exorcised. Those who were complicit must be punished. But for the nation to gain its clarity and regain its self-assurance, we have to be torn apart. I'm watching decent people being challenged to admit fundamental failure, so others elsewhere can relax and resume. For me, the only way out is to accept the ambiguity. I'm just not sure how.

Note: Yesterday I deleted an expression of anguish from Monday about the 2 hour delay. At the time, the anguish was my own. But by Wednesday, it had been appropriated by the machinery of external demands for clarity. I had lost possession of it. It no longer said what I meant. It took me till today to understand that.

I sent a letter to the Roanoke Times affirming that Virginia Tech is part Korean. Many people feel similarly. Race may not become an issue.



Thursday PM:

I didn't want to go to a Department gathering at noon. I thought we might have difficulty coming together. We didn't. It was a meaningful experience. We helped one another. They are my people. We're going to gather again on Saturday.

I was wrong when I said STS teaches no classes in Norris. One of my graduate students, an international student, teaches a Friday discussion section of Engineering Cultures in 206. That was G.V.'s room.



Friday PM:

Yesterday I gave a long interview to the Toronto Star. He wanted to discuss the increase in mass shootings. I said it was about increased audience. In part because of the expansion of communications technologies. But mainly because of the dependence of national renewal on finding an enemy we can all share. Doesn't happen in Canada. I think Montreal was different. They were all women.

Today I am at UVA with my son, Michael, hosted by Admissions. Having two kids go here split my identity between my institution and its rival. Today is different. Orange and maroon everywhere. A memorial site where many students are writing letters to Tech students. All stop at noon as the Chapel bell slowly tolls 33 times. I read that many of the candles at Tuesday's vigil came from UVA. Every time I see the Hoos for Hokies sign, I cry. And I've never considered myself a Hokie. I've learned this week that I am indeed Virginia Tech.

Higher education can no longer be called sanctuary. Virginia Tech is of the world. Our theory must catch up.



Saturday

One of my daughters, Megan, has flown in. Telephone, email, and obsessive reading had not been enough. She needed to be here. The father of the Blacksburg girl who died wrote an open letter to the community inviting us to cherish the memories we're creating with our loved ones, for one day that's all we might have.

I bought a Virginia Tech tshirt for the first time.

Marta and I hosted a gathering for STS families. Megan, Leah, and Michael did all the work while Marta and I attended the memorial service for G.V. His graduate students called him Gobichettypalayam Vasudevan, his name. We shared the food all had brought. The youngest kids chased our cats. We talked. We laughed. We discussed what to do in class the first day back.



Sunday

Last night I was told that after killing G.V. and the woman sitting closest to the door, the shooter ordered the civil engineering grad students to put their heads down on their desks. He then put three bullets into each head. In the French class, the shooter left and came back. The wounded teacher tried to hold the door shut with a table, unsuccessfully.

I signed the petition supporting Charles Steger and Wendell Flinchum.

Tomorrow is the oral defense of a Ph.D. qualifying exam. I'm on the committee.



Thursday

My biggest difficulty has been accepting the ambiguity. My career is about pursuing ambiguity, confronting ambiguity, wrestling with ambiguity, interpreting ambiguity, constructing narratives about ambiguity. But always ambiguity as object, external challenge, something to figure out. The deep, abiding acceptance of ambiguity is another thing altogether. I'm not so good at that. It came to a head for me yesterday at the crowded memorial gathering for the two faculty and fifteen students in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures. Fifteen kids extending themselves past their boundaries, learning another language, led forward by teachers with relentless, sometimes infuriating, enthusiasm.

Yet the acceptance of ambiguity just may be serving as the vehicle of new community around here. I've always defined community as sharedness that is the product of work, sharedness that assumes initial difference. This week the regular boundaries among us have blurred, if only temporarily, and everyone everywhere seems to be reveling in the joys of simple encounters, recognizing and acknowledging their privilege. A staff member brings her toddler and her dog to the office, to the celebration of all. A dean and a provost feel liberated to openly express and share emotion. The horror is starting to become a thing. It's not going away, nor will it be explained. Sharedness seems to lie in our diverse struggles to accept.




Friday

I played basketball today. Lost all three games. It was wonderful.

Gary Downey

2007-05-04

Brent Jesiek

eng

So This is How it Feels...

So this is how it feels...Thoughts on April 16, 2007

Thank you for this archive. My world view changed on this day, and I appreciate having a place to store my memories. I'm not writing this as one who was there first hand. I am writing as a VT alumnus (B.A. Theater Arts and M.A. English) and a resident of the community, to share with others who weren't there first hand either, to witness how much it still hurt for this to happen to Virginia Tech, to Blacksburg.

That Monday morning, I was at work at my former job in Salem, VA (I work in Blacksburg now) when the plant manager, whose wife works on campus, got a call from a friend. "Wife is fine...in lock down, and can't call." The call was another friend who had heard from her sister, who works in Norris Hall. Her sister had managed to get a cellphone call out from the cleaning supply closet she and a co-worker locked themselves in after the shooting started.

I logged onto the web. The news headline read "Shooting at VT. 1 dead, 1 injured." I called my husband, who works second shift, woke him up, and told him to see if he could get some current news. He said he'd call right back. In the meantime...

My friend and co-worker, got a call from her little sister, an EMT for Christiansburg/ Montgomery County. She was on the scene, and her casualty numbers were much higher. She'd heard emergency radio reports of 30 dead or injured already...she said the first response workers were going room to room in Norris Hall, and reporting in what they found.

The news on the web went up to 22 dead. My husband called with the confirmed count: 33 dead including the shooter; injury reports still coming in. Suddenly, we knew how it felt to be members of the community that is the site of the "worst mass shooting in U.S. history." I had the sensation of the ground falling out from under me. So that's how it feels...

I immediately tried to call a close friend who is an English instructor at Va Tech. (This is well before Cho is identified as an English major.) I couln't get through. I sent an email, Let me hear from you soonest...". (It would be Tuesday morning before I would hear she was okay - as okay as any of us were at that point.) My husband called back to say he'd gotten in touch with another friend whose wife teaches in Norris Hall. She didn't teach on Monday...thank Heaven. But how many co-workers or students did she know?

I got through the work day, survived the I-81 commute home, and checked messages. There were two: my sister, also a VT graduate, and my mom. Both said the same thing. "This is awful. Call me and tell me how you are." I wept, appreciating the long distance hugs. Who was I to need a hug though? It hadn't happened to me. So I thought. Then I turned on the local TV news.

Probably nothing could bring it harder home to me, just how messed up the day had been, than to see every major news channel reporting live from what I still consider my town (although I live in the next town over now). My sweet, small, safe town. I knew then that everything had changed. Blacksburg and VT had lost something that could never be regained, that sense of, "that could never happen here." We all had to grow up that day. Students, Alumni, and residents alike. Time to shed those wonderful rose-colored blinders that life in a sweet, small, safe town can afford you, and see the world, and know that there was never any protecting ourselves from this. We still aren't safe. How do you shield against madness?

My phone rang all night that April 16. College friends I hadn't heard from in years called to share their horror and sadness. (The next day I got a card from my ill-tempered and often-estranged mother-in-law, "Hope your friends are all right...")

My husband got home from work Monday night around 11:45 pm and handed me a small ribbon, orange and maroon layered on black. A co-worker of his had spent the day making 100 of them to hand out at work. I pinned mine to my lapel with a VT logo earring (one of a pair I bought to wear at the 2000 Sugar Bowl in New Orleans). For a few moments I had the only ribbon like it...

Nikki Giovanni got it right at the convocation. We will prevail. Whether the media moves on or not. That Wednsday, a Virginia-based newspaper reporter called our house, and my husband answered. Our last name is Norris. Were we any relation to the namesake of Norris Hall, and if so how did we feel about this tragedy happening in that particular building? (We aren't related.)

Here on May 3, the funerals are over, the tears are still flowing, but now the media is backing off, at least on a national level. The scab isn't being ripped off as frequently, and maybe some true healing can begin. But there's no going back to who we were. Only moving forward. Let's go Hokies!

Kim Norris

2007-05-03

Kim Norris

eng

I can only say the title is That Day

I have a daughter who on April 16 was freshman at Virginia Tech and she was safely in her dorm when the terrible events at A-J and Norris Hall took place.

She had been on the road Sunday night and I called her to check up on her.

Even though I had been on the phone with my daughter as early as 9:50 am (before we both knew what was going on, she has a noon class on Mondays and was just waking up for the day) and knew she was safe in her dorm, the entire day was difficult for me because of all the uncertainty of events. During the rest of the morning, she kept me posted by email and once text messaged her and said "stay away from the windows!" ...but I still felt quite helpless and upset that I could not be there to protect my daughter.

The Internet was my main source for information as it filtered the news through bit by bit. I wanted to know more and to know faster, I called WTOP radio station and asked them, they said they have a person on the way down.

As far as I knew, maybe they arrested the gunman, but maybe there was a gunman lose somewhere on the campus, how long would it be before they solve this and find the person, or PERSONS? Then more reports came out, "there are multiple casualties." I was thinking, what is this? What is going on? How could this be, are things under control? I jumped to the websites of the Roanoke TV stations and the Ronaoke newspaper, wanting the answers to my question. Then I walked over to my company's corporate department and asked them to turn on their TV because something is going on at Virginia Tech.

Still, news was only trickling out. Then the numbers were announced, first 21, then more and by the end of the day 32 plus the gunman. My daughter left that evening for home, but I would not see her until Thursday evening because of my business travels and was working in metro DC away from home.

On Thursday morning I remember seeing a flag at half-mask. I had a few tears and thought, it's sinking in. When I finally got home to my front door that evening, all was okay until I opened the door and saw my daughter sitting on the couch, between the door and her I became a basket case. She looked at me and asked "what's wrong dad?" I said "Nothing, I'm happy" and gave her one big and long hug I will never ever forget.

It is painful to think that other dads can no longer hug their daughters or sons. My prayers go out to each one and to their families. Some day God will wipe away our tears, but until that day, let us never forget.

Shelton Cartwright Jr

2007-05-02

Shelton Cartwright Jr

eng