[Cal-Gal]

I think that when massive tragedies happen, like the events at Virginia Tech., human nature dicates that people will look for a 'reason' or 'meaning'.

In the days following September 11th, one of the most frequent Google searches was "NOSTRADAMUS". People wanted this event to have been predicted. They wanted to believe that there is order to the universe. There is nothing more frightening than a lack of control, and when a catastrophe occurs - the last thing we want to believe is that it was random. We need there to be a motive, root causes, warning signs, and immediate action towards rectifying 'what went wrong'.

For this 18-year-old girl, her frame of reference for understanding the events of Columbine were confined to her own limited education, her experiences, her belief-structure, her world-view.

Its easy to criticize her, but really - how do the rest of us strive to make sense of these events? Do we not all use the same tools - our personal understandings and interpretations of how the world 'should work' based on our own limited experiences, our own limited education, our own limited understandings of historical, political, economic, and social affairs?

My parents generation struggled to answer the question of how and why a beloved President could be shot dead while riding in a car in Dallas. They tried to grasp the concept of nuclear war, and why they had to practise 'duck and cover' drills.

My generation struggles to understand why someone would walk into a school and begin randomly shooting people, why someone would fly an airplane into a building, why hundreds of children continue to die every day because of war, famine, disease, and poverty.

And so we study these questions, we reasearch, we debate.
We argue: civil liberties? enhanced security? gun control? tougher sentencing? racial profiling? prayer in schools? military occupation? foreign aid? affirmative action? equal opportunity? pro-life? pro-choice? capitalism? socialism? tax cuts? social programs? democrats? republicans?

Perhaps this girl's writings are fool-hardy, and perhaps we disagree with all or portions of her assessment - but she is simply trying to express herself and explain her own understanding of a larger problem; one that is far too complicated and grandiose in scope for her, or any of us, to make sense of.

None-the-less, I'm glad young Sarah took a stab at it. Without a vast diversity of voices included in the discussion - even those of naiive teenagers - the potential for achieving a solution to our society's grand questions is severely reduced.