Horrific

Yesterday was Valentine's Day--normally a time to consider that you are fortunate to be with the ones you love. To have and to hold them, to comfort & console them, to be grateful that they are with you.

Horror struck at the campus of Northern Illinois University this Valentine's Day, 2008. Life as so many knew it came to a screeching halt. One disillusioned soul, several dead victims, peril and mayhem for all involved. The pain sears through your heart, engulfing its vicious ugliness around an extended community.

We grow from young children with the wonderment of exploration. When we leave our parents and venture to college, we expect that events will change our lives. What is not anticipated is an event that changes the world.

Several of these massacres have occurred in recent time. Each more heart wrenching than the most previous, equally destructive in our ability to believe that the world is well. Something is wrong, ferociously wrong, and we are all searching for answers.

Ironically, I find the date of this tragedy to shed a sliver of light to it's morose existence. Perhaps, oddly, that this occurred on Valentine's Day sums up a simple equation.

What brought each of us into this world; what holds us together is one in the same. Quite simply, it is love. Love nurtures us from dependent infants into grown adults. It is uncompromising, unconditional, unequivocal. It is written that there is no greater gift than love.

So what of this distraught young man who thought so little of his life, his existence? What runs through the mind of one so bent on taking innocent lives with him in his quest to end his own? Was he in search of love? By voluntarily turning these families upside down was he in search of bringing with him, in his own demise, someone to come home with?

Experts in the field of psychology will examine and re-examine this case. Much will be written, posthumously, of the young man who seemingly lived an upstanding and successful life. Most of the points that I will read regarding these in-depth analysis will go right over my head. I am not of a capacity to understand the in-depth structure of the human mind. But I comprehend one thing.

This young man could not have felt love. He could not have grasped that, to the inner core of his being, there was something about him that could be loved. In my heart, I cannot fathom this sense of abandonment, but I can surmise that it is what he grappled with. There can be no other explanation than that.

He may not have experienced love, may not have believed he was worthy of love. He may have been in love and shunned. But whatever love he did not feel, he needed to know it was there. He needed to know he was loved.

No one lies in fault here. I am not placing blame in any one entity in a scenario where I am merely speculating my own hypothesis of such a traumatic series of events. All that I attempt in these words is the ability to equate how one of God's creatures could feel the depths of loneliness that would cause one to ride the path he took.

May God have forgiveness for this young man. May God have love to bestow upon him. May God somehow grant us the power to show love in everything we do, to everyone we meet. It is indeed the greatest gift of all. And we will fail as a society if we can't accept everyone whose paths cross ours to be a unique and qualified recipient of love.

We are the top of the ladder, the highest on the food chain. We're going to destroy ourselves from the inside out, if we don't work feverishly to end the hatred, end the disparity of our seemingly innocent actions without seeing the cause for positive reinforcement. Discord is evident, we need to reconnect.