"Do Not Be Overcome By Evil...

...But overcome evil with good". That’s what it says in Paul’s letter to the Romans. Brave words. Words that seem facile in the face of great evil. Yesterday there was great evil in Virginia and now 32 people are dead because one man was overcome by his dark side. It is horrible.

I never know what to say or to think or to believe when things of this nature happen. Who does? Right away the know-it-alls start with all their “solutions” — make guns illegal, close the borders, why was the school so slow to respond. On and on and on. Everybody always knows what SHOULD have happened. As I sat here working on an art book I had the radio on and as the story unfolded and more and more was learned I kept thinking about Gregory Gibson, a local book dealer, whose 18 year old son Galen was murdered in another school shooting 15 years ago.

I’ve met Gibson. His shop, Ten Pound Island Books, is on Langsford Street in Lanesville not far from Walker Hancock’s studio. And he came once to our writer’s group and spoke. His book about the aftermath of the murder of his son is titled Gone Boy and is a book both painful and comforting to read. A young Asian student, Wayne Lo, obtained a semi-automatic rifle and went to campus and began shooting. School authorities had intercepted a shipment of ammunition to Lo and done nothing about it, they had received a warning and done nothing about it. Who can ever conceive of something so evil? I couldn’t.

Here is the awful truth, we live in a violent society and we are horribly disconnected from one another. Those words seem facile to me, too, but I can’t avoid the truth of them. The students at Virginia Tech, who were huddling in the next room from where their classmates were being murdered, spoke of the mad, chilling, insane laughter they heard along with the shots that were taking the lives of their fellow students. The shooter, who has not yet been identified publically by authorities, is said to be a male Asian student who lived in one of the Virginia Tech dorms. For whatever reason, this man took his gun into a classroom and opened fire as he laughed and laughed and laughed. The very thought of that is unbearable to me.

The world is just crazy. In an essay about guns and violence, written by Gregory Gibson some years after his book was published, Gibson talks about watching the movie Rambo one evening and finding the mindless violence of it somehow oddly soothing. He was somewhat shocked at himself for feeling that way given how violence had devastated his life. I don’t understand it. And yet I watch movie like that too sometimes.

We live in a time of war. We live in a country where people are entertained by TV programs like The Sopranos and 24. I watch them, too. We live in a time of road rage where people scream at one another in traffic because everybody wants to be first, everybody wants to be the one who gets ahead. I read the discussions on message boards about everything from the war in Iraq to their favorite pizza joints and people swear at one another and use foul, violent language and say horrible things. We are all mad. I don’t understand it. Nobody does.

So today 32 people are dead in Virginia. I don’t know how many are dead in Iraq, or on America’s highways, or on the streets of Boston. We are all mad. Paul says, “Do not be overcome by evil but overcome evil with good.” We should at least try.

Thanks for reading.