An anniversary is coming up on April sixteenth - and it's going to be a rough day for my friends and me. I'll be participating in the Day of Silence on that day to protest anti-GLBT namecalling and bullying, but my heart and mind will be elsewhere on that day.
Three years ago, I was pissed off. Or my friend was pissed off. Or both of us. Honestly I don't remember exactly why or exactly which one of us were mad. All I remember is that I stopped talking to her for a few days. And then when I did manage to get online she avoided me, too. I probably deserved it. Again, I'm not sure what even happened. I don't remember after everything that came later.
Her birthday is around this time and I'm not even sure I told her happy birthday, I was so stubborn. I don't remember if we even talked about it or what she ended up doing for her birthday. I guess all that mattered is we were pissed and I definitely wasn't going to be the first person to talk, because it was just so important for me to win. Winning arguments is just so awesome I guess. And who the fuck cares if you completely avoid a friend for days, I mean, I had to win our argument over... whatever we were fighting over, three years ago. Feeling superior was just so great and it was totally worth acting like a complete jackass as long as I got to feel like I was winning.
April sixteenth, 2007. I hadn't talked to her since at least the thirteenth and I had no intention of doing so for at least a couple more days. I feel like a monster saying that but I can't write this and not be completely honest. I owe that at least.
So I woke up, made coffee and got online. Like I do every morning. I checked my e-mail and then started perusing various political blogs to see if anything interesting had happened, politically. There was nothing significant on the front page of DailyKos that early in the morning so I read the titles of the diaries on the right hand side. There were mostly snarky headlines making fun of Bush or whatever, then, I saw this:
Shooting at Virginia Tech
by FleetAdmiralJ
Mon Apr 16, 2007 at 08:02:56 AM PDT
I thought... Virginia Tech? Do I know anyone who goes there? Doesn't she lives in Virginia?
I sent my best friend a text telling her I read about the shooting and it's at Virginia Tech. When we realized that is where our friend goes, we considered the possibility that anything could have happened to her. Eventually, remembering that she had a birthday around that time and talked about skipping classes a lot lately anyway, I sent a text telling her to let me know she's okay - and let her know about the post at DailyKos.
This kept us from flying into a blind panic. We were totally thankful she's a slacker, you know? I figured there's no way she'd go to classes on that day.
I'm not naive enough think nothing bad can ever happen and I'm obviously fully capable of dealing with the fact that I'm going to die one day and everyone else is too. Having said that, it just seemed way too bizarre. Everything had to align perfectly. There'd have to be a trifecta of suck for my friend to actually end up not only in classes that day but in one of the classes in the building where Cho spent the most time.
I'm also the guy who got paralyzed when there was almost no chance of it so bad luck isn't a completely foreign concept. Who knew?
I didn't hear anything back, and neither did my best friend. I started to panic. I commented on the post:
god
my friend goes there... i haven't heard anything back from her yet.
by indiemcemopants on Mon Apr 16, 2007 at 08:23:53 AM PDT
We waited for awhile... nobody could reach her. Some people on DailyKos mentioned that it'd be difficult to get through on a cell phone anyway because a lot of people are calling into the school looking for people and any information they can find.
While I was thankful that someone I "knew" on a blog was near the school and not only warned people before the news got there but updated us throughout the day until he was forced to evacuate, there was so much craziness going on and no real way to tell what information was good.
At one point we thought there might have been two shooters, because the shootings stopped for awhile and then started again. Later, of course, we found out that the school was on lockdown and then the second the lockdown stopped, Cho shot more people.
Later, it was announced that there were twenty dead.
When the news finally decided to talk about it, the subject turned to gun rights. Keep in mind, this was about 9:30 central time, an hour after I first heard about it. Quickly, the TV news people started backtracking. They said, let's not get into political issues about guns.
I reacted the way I would usually react to such bullshit, but with the added stress of wondering if whether or not one of my best friends on the planet and someone I loved was dead inside the school. I posted this comment:
what the fuck?
"we don't want to get into the political question..." they're asking how easy it is to get an automatic or semi weapon there.
fuck that. ASK how fucking easy it is to get one of those and subsequently use it to kill twenty fucking people.
fuck.
maybe i'm still just panicking because i have not heard from my friend but this isn't the fucking time to worry about pissing off republicans.
by indiemcemopants on Mon Apr 16, 2007 at 09:39:46 AM PDT
At the time no one knew what kind of weapons Cho had, but they speculated it might be semi-automatic guns. Later it was discovered that he carried only a Glock 9mm semi-automatic handgun and a .22 caliber pistol. So, how did he cause over 100 wounds in a time frame of 9 to 15 minutes? It's been suggested that he probably brought a lot of extra ammunition, and possibly high-capacity magazines, since they're not illegal in Virginia.
Conservative Republicans started politicizing it within hours. I'm only going to link to one of these, but throughout the day, they all wondered why these college students were such cowards and so wimpy and defenseless.
The president at the time, as much as I disliked him, I hoped he would make a non-political statement about the event. I knew that he couldn't dare to appear anti-gun because his base would get mad, and that's more important than American lives, so I hoped he'd just say something nice. I was mistaken. He decided to say, "they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time." They, meaning the students and teachers. The wrong place, meaning school. No mention was made of the fact that a guy had two guns at a college and perhaps they didn't belong there. So my friend was "just in the wrong place at the wrong time", at school during school hours in class being taught by teachers on a school day. And then what? Oops, they got in the way of the dude with the guns?
All day long, I waited. I tried to get any information I could. I tried to find anyone who knew her and Amanda tried, too. I couldn't do anything. I couldn't think. I don't think I ate anything all day.
And then the only information I could find happened to be disgusting comments from armchair warriors who thought they were SO AWESOME that if they were being shot at, they'd, I guess, karate chop the shooter. Maybe use some throwing stars. Or maybe they thought everyone would have guns, and so the Right people who were Moral and Decent would be able to overpower this killer.
I don't know.
I didn't care... I was just so scared for my friend. I felt so helpless.
Honestly, getting paralyzed was nothing. I had a surgery, and there was a three per cent risk of getting paralyzed. I didn't expect it and it sucked, but it wasn't a completely shocking, life-altering event.
I swear to god I've never felt so fucking helpless and so useless in my life. I'm here in Alabama and one of the best people in the world was inside a school where some guy who just felt like shooting people bought some guns and brought them to school and fired on everyone.
Twenty deaths led to thirty - and the confusion everyone was feeling only got worse as the shooting continued. The news told us that guards didn't make it inside the building for so long that more people died than expected.
And where the fuck was she? Nobody knew. She wasn't answering texts or anything.
For a second, I hoped that maybe the first text I sent had warned her or something. It was long before the shooting started up again and I didn't know anything. I just sat and prayed - and really, I didn't think praying was doing any good. It wasn't making me feel better. What, was god gonna come down and stop this guy from shooting people? Right.
I can deal with paralysis any day. That's so fucking easy. I know what it's like and I've never been scared.
Please, please don't ever let THIS happen to anyone again. I still feel sick thinking about that day. I can't handle it and I can't get rid of the feeling of sick helplessness, that whatever was going to happen couldn't be stopped, and I would just have to sit here and beg god, if he exists, to please not take my friend from us. I'm so terrified of something like that happening again.
I'm doubtful that I could do anything but stay away from people for the rest of my life if something like that happened to me - so it's amazing to see how strong my friend has been through all this.
It was such a fucking joke to read these people who talked about the "cowards" of the Virginia Tech shooting. These people write. On blogs. What have they ever done to make the world better? I doubt that they would even think for one second about other people if something like this happened to them.
I can't even express how utterly proud I am that someone like her considers me a friend.
It baffles me.
A few days after the shooting, there was a front page story about students and teachers who did fight back against Cho. But the 'more guns would prevent shootings" crowd conspicuously ignored that.
Figures.
It wasn't until ten or so hours later that we found out she was alive. By then, I'd already freaked out on the phone with my family so much that they were oddly concerned about ME (oddly because, um, crying isn't as bad as actually getting shot or something.) I kept getting calls from everyone, and at least it got people to ask about her and to care about something that didn't happen here. That didn't affect them personally.
PTSD is a real problem. Everyone who's still alive from that day deals with its effects. There are the nightmares and panicking. Freaking out when yet another story breaks about a shooting somewhere.
I still ask her if she's okay, mentally, every time something like this happens because I know it affects her. And then there's the anniversary. It's going to suck for a bunch of us and it's going to suck profoundly worse for those who were there and those who lost loved ones.
She's a beautiful woman who got her face shot off by this person. She's had the surgeries and the rehab, god knows. It was such a long time before any of us had any contact with her because she went through so much after the shooting itself.
They fixed her jaw and everything and she looks fine - but she's still self-conscious about her face. Overall she's been amazing. Even though I've been able to deal with a paralysis I don't know how I'd cope with a shooting. At least I consented to the surgery. The level of violation she endured is insane.
I would've never been able to go back to that school and she did.
She tries to tell me that now she knows what it's like going through rehab facility-type things and relearning how to do every day activities under different circumstances but I don't think it's the same. She went through facial reconstructions and arm surgeries and constant painful physical therapy. I mean... I sit down.
But really, what's the point of a tragedy if you can't learn from it?
I learned how awesome and resilient people could be - if not that day, then the following days and weeks. I learned how lucky I am to know the people I know. They are few but they're perfect.
Most importantly, I learned to make an effort to stop worrying about petty shit. Don't think about winning or who's wrong or right, because that doesn't matter. The people you love are here now and they might not be here for very long. Make sure they know you love them.