Commencement Address

So being out of town for the heart of this past week, I got the news in bits and pieces - headlines on the papers, soundbites on the passing televisions, and of course the Internet. A troubled young man with two handguns killed 32 people and wounded a similar number at Virginia Tech. And everyone agrees that it is a horrible, horrible thing.

And the usual windbags have come forward to lambast the usual suspects: Computer Games (Jack Thompson), Gheys (Westboro Knuckledragger Church), Liberals (Rush - his logic is that the kids were rich, the shooter must hate the rich, liberals hate the rich, ergo the shooter was liberal). Yet through it all we didn't see a whole lot of information about how the kid got the guns (I had to do a bit of digging to find out it was a Walther 22 and a Glock 9)

Indeed, we've seen the exact opposite - reassurances from the government that despite this terrible, terrible thing, you can rest assured we be doing EXACTLY NOTHING to prevent it from happening again. In fact, the embedded right-wing insists that this was the fault of the victims, since this would never have happened if the students were all packing heat.

And so this is one more teaching moment for our young people, so pay attention, kids. We grown-ups? We don't like you. Its hard to imagine, but it is true. You get to a point where you suddenly wake up and, despite what the warm, white voices on the radio say, discover that when push comes to shove, we don't like you at all. When kids are shot in Ohio, when kids are shot in Colorado, when young people are tear-gassed in their homes on Cap Hill, when an American city drowns. In fact, not only do we not like you, we're going to make sure it will happen again.

We've looked at you, and then looked at the shooter, who killed two people, sent out a press release, then killed 30 more, then killed himself. And we decided to side with the crazy guy with the guns. Cause you know guns don't kill people, alienated playwrights kill people.

Just so you know, we're going to make the comforting noises because we have to, but anything that might keep this from happening again? Forget about it.

Welcome to the future, kids. Watch your ass.

More later,