It's something that happens maybe once every month or two. I meet someone new, we shake hands, initiate polite small talk and they ask me where I'm from. When I tell them, 85 percent of the people nod courteously with no glint of recognition in their eyes. The other 15 percent pause, gulp, tell me they're sorry and give me that sympathetic look reserved for old grandmothers and injured puppies.
All it took was a couple of hours for my tiny, peaceful southwest Virginia hometown to turn into an amalgam of issues way bigger than itself: gun politics, communication breakdown, the failure of the mental health system, etc.
April 16 marks the two-year anniversary of the Virginia Tech tragedy - no, not massacre, but tragedy - in which 33 lives were lost, and the valley town of Blacksburg, Va., along with its 40,000 residents, lost itself.
As a senior in high school on that infamous day, I sat in calculus class, a little over a mile away from VT's campus, watching CNN on the tiny TV the teacher wheeled in, utterly stunned. SWAT teams sprinted past buildings I knew all too well - my father's work, the residence halls of my friends and former classmates and the drill field I liked to hang out on after school - as my classmates and I frantically dialed our loved ones on campus, only to receive busy signals on the other end of the line.
It's two years later, and Blacksburg is still healing. Inspirational posters still hang throughout the town, yet I can't help but feel that the rest of the country has moved on. They have lost their compassion for the situation, the university, the students and the town involved, now only focusing on the policy implications at hand. While that's important, April 16 has become nothing but an example of a worst-case scenario, while the human element of the situation has completely eroded away.
As a freshman at AU wanting to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the tragedy last year, I was shocked to see the overall failure of fellow students and professors to break from normalcy that day. There were no major events held on campus, nor did The Eagle offer any mention of the situation.
All too quickly has the world moved on. We cannot forget that something like April 16 can happen anywhere, as it did at Northern Illinois University not even a year later. Don't get me wrong; AU has done a great job of preparing for any emergency that could possibly happen on our campus. It is comforting to know that the Office of Risk Management has put a long list of emergency management procedures in place, or that I will get an instant text alert on my cell phone informing me of an emergency. If there's anything that this fall's suitcase-gate in the Bender Arena parking garage taught us, it's that we will be informed if anything goes wrong, which I think solved half the problem.
It's hard to properly convey the still-healing scar that the day put on my conscience and sense of being, while also portraying the realization that I was one of the lucky people who did not lose any close friends or relatives. For me, April 16, 2007, however horrifying a day it was, personified how unified and compassionate the world is capable of being. However, just because the tragedy is over does not mean that the world should stop being empathetic towards the situation and the people who are still faced with picking up the pieces.
In the days following April 16, newspapers, universities and individuals across the world wrote on editorial pages, cards, T-shirts and message boards, "Today, we are all Hokies." Let's hope the message wasn't a one-time-only sort of deal.
Tamar Hallerman is a sophomore in the School of Communication and The Eagle's campus news editor. You can reach her at thallerman@theeagleonline.com.
