Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory...

I can't believe the last thing I wrote here had a keyword "amusing." Nothing even vaguely amusing has happened since then. I'm no longer even sure how many days have passed since a 23 year-old man named Cho shot and killed 32 people, and then himself, at Virginia Tech. I've blogged about this on Crimespace, and commented on other people's posts about it. I have in fact become so saturated with the poison of this stuff that I believe it's made me physically ill.

I wonder how the news anchors stand it. I can no longer turn on CNN, which is difficult because CNN has become sort of a lifeline for me, my connection to the big wide world from here, behind the redwood curtain. The excessiveness of the coverage of "the massacre" has made me close to physically ill. I mean that literally. Either it's that or I'm coming down with something viral, which I seriously doubt.

But the excess has also given me some perspective. I woke up this morning with this in my head:
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,
He is trampling down the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored,
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword,
His truth is marching on.

Why would the first verse of the Battle Hymn of the Republic be my first though upon waking? I think the key is in the second line.

I think, taking a very long view of the massacre and all the tragedy surrounding it (including the tragedy of Cho himself, a wasted individual who was mentally ill and never got the help that might have saved him and his victims) the time has come to trample down the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.

We need an end to violence, wherever it is found. Period. Full stop.

It has long been obvious that we need an end to the War in Iraq. But we also need an end to videogames in which characters are blown away routinely by boys too young to understand that if you shoot a person they don't just pop back up, like in a game. Those are the two ends of a continuum -- we need to change everything in between, too.

We need a culture in which compassion and kindness are valued in everyone, not consigned only to wimps and the Dalai Lama.