weekly post from April 20, 2007

Hello friends & loved ones,

It's an absolutely beautiful day in Western, NY with temps in the low 60's and the sun shining bright bright bright. There are still clumps of snow here and there that are trying to stay on the ground as long as possible. They won't last much longer at all.

Despite the sun in this part of the world, the sun isn't shining in Virginia this week. This past week our Virginia experienced something horrific. The tragedy that happened at Virginia Tech this past Monday is something most of us would never have imagined happening. All week long television has been flooded with stories about what happened. This is nothing new. Whenever something tragic like this happens, the news inundates us with the story dissected in more ways than we could possibly imagine. It's overkill times 100. It gets to the point to where the story produces a feeling of "UGH! Not again!" and I want to change the channel immediately.

The past week has had more than its share of finger pointing. Blaming (yes, that's the awful "B" word) is counter productive; it gets us nowhere. There are many arguments about this tragedy, however, those who say a lockdown would have been the best thing really need to think about that. There was a two hour lull between attacks at the campus and no one knows where the student was in those two hours. If the campus had been locked down, who's to say that the student would not have been in another building? Also VT is a 2,600 acre campus; I wouldn't want to be in charge of shutting down a facility that huge. Were mistakes made by the campus? Yes. Could they have handled things differently? Certainly. What other campuses around the nation need to be doing is focusing on how they can prevent this type of incident. Let's face it most campuses aren't safe the way they should be. Instead of beating a dead story we need to be proactive and prevent this from happening again. Our culture wants to talk about things 500 different ways from Sunday. My heart goes out to the families of the people who were killed and to the family of the gunman. While we are all healing let's remember that we are all united and blaming and pointing fingers will only prolong the pain.

To my friends & loved ones enjoy your weekend. As always be safe, be healthy and be happy.

love,

paul