Governor Perry is encouraging Texans to observe the Day of Mourning. http://www.governor.state.tx.us/divisions/press/pressreleases/PressRelease.2007-04-19.2511
a time article saying the president of VT should resign... if he does for the specific reasons that the article outlines, IMO, it certainly won't be because the university didn't do it's part...
An interesting view from one of our stockmember. I thought she expressed it very well...and thanks Sheriden for a beautiful sermon ! " So much of this seems to be about something we call empathy, the sense of belonging to a community, of shared experiences and values, a common language, a language that can be spoken and mutually comprehensible, or that might be music, mathematics, baseball lore, or the stock market. What is striking on one level is how this group has come to be a community and is willing and able to share and respect what is shared by each. There is obviously represented here a myriad of opinions, personalities, interests, skills, knowledge, and on and on and on. But the mutual respect is the glue. And there is certainly a parallel to be drawn between a society of law and the clear rules this group adheres to. But what is striking on a much deeper level is how, and why, we feel such pain and react with such force at this truly terrible tragedy, the young lives ended, shattered in an instant, families devastated but hopefully not destroyed, friends, classmates, a fine university, all will live forever with the memory of that day, and the circle widens to reach out to all of us, none or few of us are spared. Yes, the promise of youth cut down senselessly and the terrible irony of the Romanian professor who survived the worst horror of our lifetime, the holocaust, the brutality of the Nazis, who survived his own Ceaucescu madness, who came to America and died here trying to save his students from another kind of insanity. But time and distance work to remove the horror from our minds; otherwise, we could not continue. Why do we not shudder at the millions who have died in our lifetimes in senseless wars? Why do we not react with the same degree of outrage and pain to the deaths of 183 Iraqis the very next day. Indeed every day, at least twice as many Iraqis die as that one horrible day in Virginia. Is it because we cannot identify with them as readily? Is it because somehow we don’t sense that they are really part of our “community”? And yet, intellectually we know, and I venture to say even deep within our psyches we know, that we are all one and the same. Perhaps there are no “accidents” in this world. There is only cause and effect, total interaction and interdependence. Where do each of us stop and others begin? Richard Boehm, a prominent 20th c quantum physicist, described physical reality as “a continuous whole in flowing movement”. The amazing concordance of science and the South American butterfly. But that is a hard concept for us to grasp usually and we have to hide behind time and distance and differences, and we invent notions like fate to explain the inexplicable. Cho. Where did he come from? How did he get to where he got? A kid himself..... . utterly distraught, but without the moral intelligence to put his own suffering and pain in some kind of perspective and deal with it in a “normal” way. When we weep, we weep for all 33, hard as that might be. And the 3,000 who died on 9/11 and the other 3,000 since that we honor and respect and remember and thank for their sacrifices for our sakes. What is this fear that permeates our society? Fed to us constantly by the media, bandied by our politicians, institutionalized by our government, color-coded and drummed into us at every turn? What is this violence our film industry, our video games “entertainment” industry plies us with? 11,500 homicides by firearms a year when all of Europe (for example) is less than 10% of that. I was born bred and raised in Texas and respect our heritage, our past, but it is just that…. past. When will we grow up and stop playing cowboys and Indians? Is violence really an easier answer than understanding our oneness? Sermon over. Do I feel better in my ignorance? Is the pain gone? No. We are all Hokies, all Iraqis. SD
okay, i stopped reading this thread for a while, and now i caught up. I hate that chick on CNN with a passion. Bottom line, let's be nice to people. It's not that freaking hard.
i decided to finally watch the video. wow, that was the most r****ded **** ive seen ever. If you ever watch wrestling, it reminded of the Ultimate Warrior.
There is nothing to learn from these tapes. It's all incoherent garble. I'm not just saying that to be insulting. It's seriously just a bunch of nonsense and there's nothing to 'learn' from watching them. The only reason the media is showing them is for the shock value. That's it. BTW, I watched MSNBC for about 30 seconds last night. That fat guy that yells a lot (Bruce Matthews?) was talking about the backlash the media is receiving for constantly playing the video. Oh yeah....the video was playing while he was talking...
I cannot believe this: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/218179/wbc_to_protest_the_funerals_of_virginia.html April 2007 has been a month ripe with scandals, heated social debate and tragedy. The Virginia Tech massacre has illustrated the capability of barbarism in human beings, and unfortunately, such illustration happens on a daily basis. It is not difficult to scan the news channels and websites to find a daily death toll throughout the world that easily tops the 100 mark. Such a number is the result of murders alone, and many try desperately to understand what brings a person to take innocent lives. Sadly, to truly understand the mentality needed to massacre groups of people, a person would need to possess such a warped mind-set. Nevertheless, deluded mentalities are not only held by troubled murderers. The Westboro Baptist Church (God Hates Fags) has announced on one of their many websites that they plan to protest the funerals of the Virginia Tech students. The following is taken from their site www.godhatesamerica.com: "WBC will preach at the funerals of the Virginia Tech students killed on campus during a shooting rampage April 16, 2007. You describe this as monumental horror, but you know nothing of horror -- yet. Your bloody tyrant Bush says he is 'horrified' by it all. You know nothing of horror -- yet. Your true horror is coming. "They shall also gird themselves with sackloth, and horror shall cover them; and shame shall be upon all faces, and baldness upon all their heads" (Eze. 7:18). Why did this happen, you ask? It's simple. Your military chose to shoot at the servants of God today, and all they got for their effort was terror. Then, the LORD your God sent a crazed madman to shoot at your children. Was God asleep while this took place? Was He on vacation? Of course not. He willed this to happen to punish you for assailing His servants." For those who find it difficult to understand the mental processing of someone who can so easily take the lives of numerous people, trying to understand the beliefs and ideals of the WBC is guaranteed to result in a mind-numbing pain. This group, headed by senile basket case, Fred Phelps, has preached their message of hatred for over 16 years, protesting the funerals of US soldiers in the process. Now, on the wake of the worst shooting in US history, the WBC has sunk to a new low. While I am an advocate for free speech, it is people like Phelps who make the nation wonder if unbridled free speech is an amendment worth protecting. Free speech is something worth protecting, however, there should be a clause added to the 1st Amendment. A clause that states: any person using their free speech rights to protest a funeral will waive their legal protection from physical harm done by those attending the funeral services.
Ugh, just pure, vile hatred. The American Baptist and Southern Baptist orgniazaitons should sue and force Westboro to change its name to Westboro We Call Ourselves Baptists in Name Only Church.
I'm wondering something. How many people are actually going to do this? See, I have an actual maroon Virginia Tech shirt, and I'm thinking about wearing it to show support, but I'm afraid I would just get weird looks or people would think it was in bad taste. I may just play it safe and wear another maroon or orange shirt (in a little while when I get back to the school where I'm a student... I'm still in my dress up clothes until I finish with work up here). What would you do? (and it feels trivial to even be worrying about what shirt to wear, compared with the issues faced by everyone who was personally affected by this tragedy )
