Laura Anderman 2

Safe

I live on a college campus.

Everyday, I walk over the sloping lawns to my red-brick class buildings, where I sit among a dozen other students and work through the curriculum. I know some of the people in my classes; others are strangers. Afterwards, we leave the classroom to resume our lives, laughing and talking. There are always one or two people who are pretty quiet most of the time, but usually I don’t think about it too much. I usually just enjoy the time with my friends, as we sit on the grass drinking smoothies and talking about whatever comes to mind. If it starts getting dark, I don’t worry. I’ve made the walk across campus so many times. Late at night, sometimes. And alone. But it’s never really bothered me.
After all, I’ve always felt safe here.

Sometimes, though, things happen that draw to my attention to my perceived safety. This time, it was the tragedy at Virginia Tech. A 23-year-old Korean man named Cho Seung-hui shot two students in a campus dormitory, then proceeded to another campus complex and systematically moved from classroom to classroom, firing at everyone in sight. After killing thirty students and wounding another twenty nine, the rogue student took his own life with one of his two handguns.

I first became aware of it through an overheard conversation. Two girls, passing by me in a hallway, were talking. “Yeah, did you hear?” one asked, “Sounds like Virginia Tech had some kind of murder or something earlier. I saw it on the news.” I stopped in my tracks and turned around. By then, though, they were too far away, their conversation carried away with them.

I didn’t have to wait too long to find out for myself what had happened. Within an hour of Cho’s death, news had already started filtering from the crime scene, leaking into television and radio briefs and postings on news websites. I saw a hastily written article on the BBC News website. “Shots fired at Virginia Tech...15 deaths confirmed so far,” the article said. There was little else it said. It was too soon for a more detailed account, and it appeared as though the reporter had spent all of his information on the grisly yet compelling headline. The sparse information gradually began to expand into something more substantial. News sources were clamoring for estimates of the death toll, grasping at eyewitness reports and desperately attempting to fit the first few pieces of the puzzle together.

Even with what little information had been released so far, I was stunned by the act. I remember the nation’s response to the Columbine school shooting years ago. The voices of politicians bickering over gun-control would mix with those concerned parents blaming the schools and each other for the conflict. But for now, the only voices heard were the reporters, telling us what had been discovered so far.

Within the next few hours, things began to come together. The identity of the shooter and many of the victims were still unknown, but the events were forming a more coherent timeline. At 7:15 that morning, two victims were killed in West Ambler Johnston Hall. A girl had spent the night with her boyfriend, and she was returning to her dorm room to get ready for her 8 AM class. She had been shot once in the head, from behind. She never saw the face of her attacker. The noise attracted the attention of the Resident Advisor. He rushed toward the sound of the gunshots, hoping to defuse whatever tense situation might be occurring. Upon arriving at the dorm, though, he was shot and killed. Less than ten minutes later, the campus police responded the emergency call, but believed it to be an isolated incident, a shooting borne out of jealousy of a love-triangle gone awry. They started looking for connections, and began searching for a perpetrator. After deciding to focus on the female victim’s current and previous boyfriends, they believed the matter to be simple and complete. They didn’t know then that the bloody footprints they saw leaving the building were not the end of the affair.

Two hours later, in the classrooms of Norris Hall, the murderer struck again. It started in room 206, a graduate class in advanced hydrology. The shooter didn’t give any warning or make a sound; he just opened the door and started firing. The first shot connected with the head of the professor, which sent the thirteen students scrambling for cover. He aimed two handguns around the room, picking off the students one by one, before reloading. He circled the room a second time, counter-clockwise. At the farthest point during his circle, a few of the wounded students attempted to bolt for the door. The gunman was quicker, however, and fatally wounded them a few more quick shots. After looking around for any survivors, he moved on to the room across the hall.

The sound had filtered into the elementary German class, and students were starting to get edgy. Someone suggested pushing something in front of the door, just in case. It was then that the door opened and the shots began. Like the other classroom, the professor died first of a gunshot to the head. The gunman fired thirty shots before he stepped back into the hall. Three students seized the small opportunity, and they closed the door to the hall. It would not lock, so they wedged their feet against the bottom of the door to keep it closed. It saved their lives; a few minutes later the shooter tried to reenter the room. He threw himself against the door in an attempt to open it, and then fired four shots into the wood. After finding himself unable to enter, he eventually moved down the hall to next room.

In the brief break from the German class, he moved on to the intermediate French class next door. Like their neighbors, the students had suspected something was amiss. A panicked student pushed a heavy table against the door, and another student started to call 911. The desk did not delay the shooter for long, however, and he forced his way into the room. He methodically fired his shots, before continuing his migration from classroom to classroom.

Between the noise from the gun and the muffled screams of wounded, the other people on the floor had a pretty clear idea that something was wrong. This feeling caused a girl in a ten-person computer class to peer outside her classroom door. She saw an Asian man “dressed like a boy scout” carrying two guns. He was headed toward her. She quickly alerted her classmates, and they secured a table in front of the door. Three students threw their weight against the heavy table, hoping it would be enough to barricade the entrance. The shooter rammed into the door from the outside, forcing it open about six inches, but was unable to enter the room. He fired two shots into the room, one embedding itself in the wall, the other connecting with the lectern. They heard the sound of an empty clip dropping to the floor, and a new one being inserted with a click. But the fresh bullets were not for them, and heavy footsteps continued down the hall away from them.

A professor in his office on the third floor heard the commotion, and he believed he could stop it. He locked his students in his office to protect them, and ran down the stairs to confront the shooter. He was quickly gunned down. Below, from an office on the ground floor, a professor and a research assistant attempted to flee the building. They rushed to the front doors, only to find them chained and padlocked shut. Several frightened students rushed toward them, looking for a place to hide. The group returned the professor’s office, and locked the door. They remained there until the police cleared the building twenty minutes later.

There was only one remaining classroom on the second floor: solid mechanics, taught by Liviu Librescu, a Holocaust survivor. It is in this room that one of the most lasting stories of the incident’s heroism started. The gunshots and screams had given all the warning the students needed, and most of the twelve students were crouched on the concrete window ledge outside the building. They were prepared to take their chances jumping onto the grass and shrubs below. It offered more of a chance than a crazed shooter who had already killed almost everyone on the second floor. Librescu was positioned against the door, holding it closed because it wouldn’t lock. The gunman fired shots through the door, with five rounds striking Librescu in the arm, leg, and torso. Eventually the wounded elderly man was overpowered, and the killer forced the door open. The professor stepped between the shooter and his students, giving them a split-second of protection before the man killed Librescu with one clean shot to the head. Three people jumped to the ground below. Several others lowered themselves along the ledge before attempting to drop gently onto the grass. The remaining students were shot several times each, just as in every other room. Yet again, the killer stepped into the hallway, and out of sight.

It was now 9:45 AM. The whole rampage had taken around 30 minutes from start to finish. By now, the survivors in the building and bystanders in the surrounding area were flooding the local 911 call center with a deluge of reports. The Virginia police and SWAT teams were already on their way to the building. Their progress was slowed by the chained doors, but they entered the building within ten minutes. When the team first entered the building, they heard gunshots echoing through the quiet halls. Though he had gone through the entire floor by that point, the killer was occupying himself by firing additional rounds into the unmoving bodies of the students. The noise of breaking down the chained door must have alerted him that his time was up. As the SWAT team ascended the stairs to the second floor, they heard one final resounding gun blast, followed by an eerie silence. By the time they arrived, the gunman was lying on the floor. He had taken his own life with a single shot to the temple. The time was 9:55 AM.

We now have a timeline for the horrifying events, but it doesn’t mean much to me. This is not what I have been looking for, or what I hope to read. As Joseph Stalin once said, “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” There are numbers of people who have been killed, but we don’t know anything about them. We don’t know their names or their stories, their hopes or their dreams. And without that information, the story seems hollow. Without information about the participants, I cannot mourn those lives lost. So I do the only thing I can do: wait a bit longer.

Initially, the most crucial player in the story was the most enigmatic. The gunshot that had taken his life had disfigured his features too terribly for reliable facial recognition, and he carried no identification cards or characteristic items at the time of his death. So the infamous shooter, for the time being, remained a mystery. The first two victims identified were the first ones shot, at the initial shooting in the campus dormitory. Emily Hilscher and Ryan Clark were killed nearly two hours before the massacre in Norris Hall. Slowly, they identified the victims in the classrooms and hallways of Norris. A list was released of professors and students killed that day: Alameddine, Bishop, Bluhm, Cloyd, Couture-Nowak, Granata, Gwaltney, Hammaren, Herbstritt, Hill, Lane, La Porte, Lee, Librescu, Loganathan, Lumbantoruan, McCain, O'Neil, Ortiz, Panchal, Perez Cueva, Peterson, Pohle, Pryde, Read, Samaha, Shaalan, Sherman, Turner, White. They came from many different countries and all walks of life. Essentially the only thing they had in common was that they were in one place at one time. The wrong time, it seemed.

Now there was but one person left to identify: the killer himself. After withholding the information for a day, the media finally named the culprit. His name was Cho Seung-Hui. He was a Korean citizen with a United States green card, and he was a student at Virginia Tech. He also had a history of mental problems and instability. He had stalked several women on campus; written plays about torture, death, and social alienation; and even been committed to a mental asylum back in 2005.

He was best known on campus as “the question mark boy,” from his reputation to write a question mark instead of his name on class sign-in sheets. He would obsess over girls, but he would never give them his name; he would introduce himself by saying his name was “question mark.” During one of his stalking incidents, he also wrote a line from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet on a whiteboard in the girl’s dorm room. It is from Act 2, scene II, where Romeo laments to Juliet “My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself…Had I it written, I would tear the word.” Cho told his roommate once that he barely knew himself, and it didn’t bother him. In his own mind, Cho was as foreign as he was to his classmates.

Cho was the anonymous kid who sits in the back of the room, picked on by some and ignored by the rest. It was pretty apparent that he had been picked on as a kid, over and over again by many different people, in his classes and in the halls, even in his church’s youth group. Eventually, he stopped speaking in classes, and he only exchanged a few words with his roommates. Psychologists speculate that he had a mild form of autism that kept him from being socially adept with his peers; the burden of learning English as his non-native language probably didn’t help. He was overshadowed at home, as his older sister was a graduate of Princeton who works for the United States government. Still, he went to the reputable – if not quite prestigious – Virginia Tech, attempting a degree in business information management. It was one of the most difficult and respected majors at the school, but Cho dropped out of the department to become an English major instead. Though the school can’t legally reveal any of the reasons for his switch in major, a few theories can be posited. It was unlikely that he did it simply for the love of writing. More likely, Cho attempted the classwork but was not able to maintain the grades he needed. It left him with no real choice but to abandon his dream and concoct another plan. This picture of Cho is a bleak one: a friendless, poor student and unappreciated son.
In that sense, it’s no real surprise that Cho concocted an identity for himself. He never once mentioned his name in the multi-media manifesto he sent to NBC. He refers to himself as a savior, even calling himself “Jesus Christ” before the cameras. During his tirades, he mentions other names: John Mark Karr, a former schoolteacher who claimed to have killed JonBenet Ramsey; Debra LaFave, another schoolteacher who was convicted of molesting one of her students; and Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the two teenagers responsible for the Columbine school shooting eight years earlier. He cited their names and attributed their power to himself. For him, the shooting was an attempt at acquiring power. He couldn’t get it through his own actions, but by allying himself with people in roles of authority, Cho insures that he is remembered. He has set himself apart from being just another school shooter; he has given himself a new rank, in a new order. For Cho, this massacre was the ultimate act of empowerment. Unfortunately, the warning signs were left unheeded until it was too late.

Everyone claims they could have predicted Cho stepping over the edge and lashing out…but they didn’t. Investigators believe that he started planning the murders in February, when he bought the first of the handguns and started working out. I wondered what had set him off; what could have triggered him to do this. I wondered if it could have been avoided. After all, so many people had pegging him as a dangerous individual. Yet dangerous is a fluid concept. I can’t specifically blame them for it, after all. You can’t always tell who is dangerous just by looking at them. If that were the case, we could simply isolate dangerous individuals before they are given a chance to threaten others. The dangerous individual is dangerous because they are, overly, no different than the rest of us. And that’s why Cho is a particular ominous figure to me; he didn’t stand out in a crowd.

It has been several days since the shooting, but I still can’t get my mind off of it. It wanders around my brain, providing me with a constant preoccupation in classes and in social circles. I sit in economics wondering what the students sitting around me would do if a murderous gunman came in shooting. In Japanese class, I wonder how one best translates the phrase “multiple fatality school shooting”. I neglect my schoolwork to browse the news sites, constantly loading and refreshing the webpages, waiting for the next tidbit of information to soak into the mainstream. I wait for the moment that new reports are posted; I crave the tang of the adrenaline flowing through my bloodstream when I se the latest update. But even as I watch the stories unfold on the screen, my own reactions scare me.

I’ve always had an interest in forensic science, and the step-by-step processes of solving and recreating a crime. But even so, my sudden, macabre interest in this particular case disconcerts me to the point of distraction. Usually, I am attracted to a case that has a peculiar mystery or burning question attached to it. There is no such problem here. Although Cho cannot legally be called the murderer – technicality states that he must be brought to court and found guilty before such a moniker can be attached to his name – almost all of the evidence supports him being the sole perpetrator of the act. There is, then, no question of guilt, or any extenuating circumstances that usually otherwise draws my attention. I can’t understand why a mass murder in a place I’ve never been literally has brought my life to halt. This is the core of my problem: I’m not sure what it is about Virginia Tech that has grabbed my attention so entirely, and the implications of it worry me.

I certainly hope I’m not another Cho, interested in plotting the murder of complete strangers for bizarre and unintelligible reasons. What was the model that Cho fit? What caused Cho to become the shooter? Personally, I’ve had my rough patches in life. I’ve gotten not-so-stellar grades in school. I’ve switched my major. I’ve even been teased and bullied. But I’ve never pulled a gun on my classmates. I’ve never wanted to kill or injure those who have hurt me. What is that strange X-factor that causes some to progress unscathed while others resort to violence? It scares me to think that this potential to cause great pain lies within all of us. We’re all dangerous if we don’t police ourselves appropriately. So although I can’t completely exonerate myself from Cho’s actions, I do my best to view the proceedings at an arm’s length. All the while, I cannot help but listen to that little nagging voice inside my head asking Why? Why do you care so much? There must be something wrong with you to be concerned about something like this.

The answers come in a strange, sudden epiphany. It is not the case itself that attracted my attention. It is the people. I see myself in the participants that day. The victims were around my age. They were college kids, like me, attempting to find their way through a constantly changing and unfamiliar world. They had dreams and aspirations and fears and problems. There was nothing that specifically held them to that foreign world of Blacksburg, Virginia. They could have easily been anyone, anywhere. This day, this crime could have been anywhere in the world. The victims could have been my friends. My brothers or sisters. My professors. Me.

This point is driven home emphatically later that week. A few days after the original incident, the administration of my school sends out an email. It says that earlier that morning, during an altercation with his family, a town resident had threatened his family. He said that he understood how the murderer at Virginia Tech felt, and that he ought to get a gun and go to my school.

For a moment, my heart stops. I clench the side of the table and wonder if Virginia Tech was only the beginning. I suspect that Cho’s madness is infectious, and suddenly the whole United States – the whole world – might be gripped with some feverish thirst for blood. But the moment passes. I continue reading the email. It says the man’s family had the presence of mind to report his threats to the police, and law enforcement removed him from the town. He is on his way to a mental facility in a different county, the email assures me. There is no danger. We’re all safe.
Even so, that day I kept a wary eye open during my usual walks across campus. My daily routine became anything but ordinary, as I kept jumping at any strange sounds and peering around corners to spy anyone who might look dangerous. No matter how often I told myself that no gunman was going to jump out of the bushes, my heart still raced every time a squirrel darted out in front of me. The only thing I that calmed me down was occasionally catching a glimpse of the Campus Security officers walking the sidewalks around the school. When I see them, they act as a temporary source of safety, and I can breathe easy again, if only for a few minutes.
Safe; it’s a strange word that encompasses physical, social, spiritual, financial, political, emotional, occupational, and psychological well-being. Protection is the key to safety, but protection isn’t always reliable. And how can one protect oneself from stray, random chance? Cho’s killing was planned, but that doesn’t make it sensical or even coherent. Of those who lived, there was no set pattern. It was chance, not safety, that guided them through their ordeal.

As I hear more details of that day, I realize that I aspire to be like these people. They showed bravery, quick thinking, and a sense of compassion even in the face of tragedy. Stories of heroic acts and lucky breaks continue to appear on television reports and websites. Professors confronting the gunman in a final attempt to save their students, if only by buying them a few crucial seconds. Students pulling strangers into closets or locked rooms away from the shooting. The slightly wounded providing first aid to those who were gravely injured, trying desperately to save their lives. It did not matter in those moments who you were, so long as you were there, together.

This sense of human connection is what captivates me. In most cases, these people were not the best of friends. In fact, some of them were complete strangers. The survivors tell of their time under fire, and they don’t tell you the names of the people who helped them. They can’t; most of them didn’t know each other prior to the incident. But even though these figures were nameless, they certainly won’t be forgotten any time soon. These strangers sheltered and protected each other when the administration and police couldn’t save them.

Most professors are remembered by their students for their lectures in the classroom. But the professors at Virginia Tech made the ultimate sacrifice for their students. The five faculty members killed in the attack did what they could to protect their students. Especially Liviu Librescu, whose tale is both inspiring and saddening. He survived the Holocaust, only to die during another mass act of hatred and violence. On Holocaust Remembrance Day, nonetheless. Although Librescu’s tale is the most widely publicized, he was not alone in protecting the students. Take Kevin Granata, the professor who rushed down from the third floor to confront Cho. Granata probably would have survived the attack if he had stayed in his office. But he cared about the students far too much to stay out of harm’s way. He put himself in the line of danger in hopes of contributing to the greater good.

Another tale comes from Clay Violland, from the French class. As Cho fired around the room, Violland fell to the ground, acting as though he had already been shot. While on the ground, he made eye contact with another girl on the ground. They stared at each other, focusing on the living and not on the dead, until Cho left the room several minutes later. Violland did not know who she was, but for that moment it did not seem to matter. They provided each other with a moment of connection, of support, in the middle of a catastrophe.

It seems I am not the only one drawn in by the strength of this universal human connection. On the Virginia Tech memorial website, there are over 600 pages of comments from concerned individuals. Most of them never knew the victims. A lot of them have never been to Virginia Tech. Some of them have never even set foot on US soil. But they heard the tale of this random act of hate and anger, and they care. They send out condolences to the families and friends and communities. It does not matter anymore that these people are strangers; it simply matters more that they are people who care.

Yet this human connection serves as a somber reminder of the one who perpetrated these acts in the first place. Cho was a loner, and the outpouring of care and support is something he probably did not know in life. It seems to be the ultimate irony: the person who could not understand and appreciate such things in life unintentionally created a fresh start for them in death.

I’ve heard many people say that Cho was “an evil man” and that the events at Virginia Tech “proved that people are capable of atrocious things.” Indeed, people sometimes do terrible things to each other. However, the events of April 16th proved to me that people are capable of great kindness and compassion as well. And Cho…he did a terrible thing, to be sure, but I don’t think he was inherently evil. He was misguided, perhaps. And lonely. He was never safe, not even from himself.
Virginia Tech is a tragedy because so many young lives were lost without rhyme or reason. Their promise and potential were snuffed out in an instant. The faculty, too, their professors and mentors, had done great things in their fields of study, and they were still easily capable of more. Yet, despite these losses, I find it somehow comforting that people can band together and express hope for the future when things seem bleak.

Safety isn’t found in locked doors or bolted windows. It’s found in the people around us. And that’s why Cho’s case is so scary. He was in the midst of a crowd of people; he was an “insider” to the situation, so his sudden betrayal immediately compromises that feeling of safety. Cho was his own enemy, and thus became everyone else’s, as well. It comes down to knowing one’s boundaries, and policing them. Cho was socially awkward enough to not be entirely sure of his own boundaries or anyone else’s. He was teased, and he withdrew. He was suicidal when he was committed to the mental institution. His family and roommates were concerned that he would be unable to control his self-destructive urge, so they sent him for psychiatric evaluation. Initially, the psychiatrist checked the box stating that Cho presented a physical risk “to himself or others.” Later, after another evaluation, they determined that Cho only presented a risk to himself, not to anyone else. On this judgment, the decided to release him from the psychiatric facilities to be kept under watch at home. They didn’t know then that because of Cho’s inability to control his own actions, he already presented a risk to everyone around him, as well as himself. Because, for Cho, the threat was deep inside.

We are taught and hard-wired to believe that threats come from outside our boundaries; outside our space. We prepare ourselves that way too, always assuming that the person with malicious intent is someone we do not know. We build walls and guard the outer perimeter. But this insulation acts both ways; the outsiders cannot enter, but everyone inside is trapped. Take, for example, the heavy metal doors to Norris Hall. They were reinforced to protect those inside, but when Cho chained them shut, they suddenly became a death sentence, condemning those inside to remain in danger. Perhaps the same is true of Cho himself. When he put up walls to protect himself from the world, he found that he still wasn’t able to keep control of himself. Unfortunately, no one could really help him keep order within himself. So he eventually found his own way out, and it cost others their lives and safety..
We can’t be safe from the things we cannot predict. We may buckle our seatbelts whenever we’re in a car, but there’s no way of knowing beforehand whether we will end up needing to swerve or brace for impact. The seatbelt’s a worse-case scenario, and although seatbelts save lives every year, they don’t assure survival in back wrecks. In fact, the seatbelt has caused fatalities, too; although it’s not too common, sometimes seatbelts snap the wearer’s neck or trap crash victims in the shell of their destroyed vehicle. Yet most of us do it anyway, because we feel that there might come a point where we’re glad we did.

School shootings, however, don’t come equipped with a safety feature. Students can’t buckle into their chairs and desks don’t come with airbags. How, then, to create a safer school shooting? Drills? Perhaps, but there are some problems with standardizing a response to something that is very much an individual incident. Some elementary school teachers in Murfreesboro, Tennessee learned that the hard way. They conducted a mock school shooting, warning the students that it “wasn’t a drill”. They told the students to hide under tables or lie on the floor. A teacher, disguised in a hooded sweatshirt, banged and rattled locked doors, while the terrified kids cried and pleaded for their lives. Clearly, this was a poorly-implemented attempt at preparation for what might become a real event. But in addition to some questionable judgment calls, school shooting drills have a key structural flaw. Imagine if every school develops strict protocol in response to school shootings. During an attack, the students will turn off the lights, close the shades on the window, lock the door, and huddle under desks. Drills are run a few times a year, and all the kids know exactly what to do should an attack occur. Sounds plausible, but keep in mind that most school shootings are perpetrated by students who attend the schools they target. Suddenly, a decent plan of action becomes a veritable death sentence. The shooter knows exactly how they’ve prepared for his or her arrival, and doubtlessly they will have planned out a countermeasure. If they break the lock or force open a window, then the shooter has easy access to dozens of helpless, huddling targets. Even worse, imagine if one of the students had thought to fight back against the supposed shooter during the unannounced drill. The mock-up could have easily escalated into a genuinely dangerous situation. So I think any form of prepared response is simply a bad idea in this situation. It’s like handing any potential gunman a map to the building.

We’ll never be “safe” from school shootings in the traditional sense, as we will never really be able to preempt or prepare for every possible attack. The foreknowledge of safety, then, must simply be replaced with a bit of common sense. In the heat of the moment, even some of the bravest people at Virginia Tech made mistakes that cost them their lives. Kevin Granada is a prime example of this. His desire to protect the students was brave and noble, without a doubt, but he rushed into a perilous situation without a weapon or any real plan of attack. He wasn’t even originally marked to be victim, either, since his office was on the third – not second – floor. He compromised his own safety in a futile effort to protect his students.

How, then, do we become truly safe? Cho teaches us we can’t really be safe. It’s an absolute ideal, and like most similar extremes it’s impossible to initiate them effectively in reality. “Safe” is an all-encompassing concept of protection. To be safe is to be without risk of harm, and it’s a condition that can’t be implemented on a wide scale without adverse effects. Ensuring safety in this sense isn’t feasible; it would require everyone to lock themselves in their houses, surrounded by padded furniture and antiseptic surfaces. It’s an elimination of risk, to be sure, but it can hardly be called “living”.

Obviously, being “safe” is out of the question. From here, though, we must shift our focus from being “safe” to being “safer”. The emphasis on comparison helps put such a vague and cumbersome concept into perspective. We can’t be safe from people like Cho, but we can be safer by preparing ourselves mentally and being aware of our surroundings. We can force ourselves to create a contingency plan, even if we suspect we’ll never use it. Apart from that, there’s nothing we can really do to protect ourselves from stray products of fate. If it can’t be foreseen, there’s no reason to worry ourselves sick about it. It’s why people tried to resume a “normal” life as quickly as possible after September 11th. It was an unfortunate experience, to be sure, but there was no reason to believe it would be a recurring event. And if even if it was attempted again….well, this time we’d be ready for it. After all, we watch our borders pretty closely. It’s just when we ignore the interior that we get into trouble.

Paranoia isn’t an admirable quality. But if you can strike a balance of awareness and relaxation, then there’s nothing really to worry about. I’ve thought about it, but I haven’t let it consume me. I’ve wondered what I would do if a classmate suddenly pulled out a gun and went on a rampage. I’ve pondered a response to someone leaning out of a window in one of the red brick buildings, shooting the passersby with a sniper rifle. It’s made me confront exactly what it means to be safe in a world where no protection is guaranteed and everyone, everyone is potentially dangerous.

Luckily, not everyone is dangerous. We may cast our glances warily over our shoulders, but when the time comes and a threat appears, a polarization occurs instantly. Looking down the barrel of a gun acts as an instantaneous catalyst; suddenly, the shooter has to deal with people who outnumber him and are willing to do whatever they can to stop him. In that moment, everything becomes clear. Everyone is dangerous, but some of the dangerous people are on your side. And together you’re united against a common enemy. Having others around is the closest we’ll ever truly come to being safe, because as long as we’re with someone else, at least we won’t be alone. People tend to subscribe to the “buddy system”; as long as we have someone else with us, we won’t need to worry. There’s some degree of safety in numbers. If we’re together, as long as we’re not alone, we’ll all be okay.

As flawed as our search for the perfect haven might be, it’s evident everywhere, especially in response to a large-scale tragedy like September 11th or Virginia Tech. It’s the epitome of so many phone calls placed by students after the massacre. At the heart of every message were the words the world wanted to hear, summed up in every phone call to a parent, sibling, or friend:

“Don’t worry…I’m safe.”