Courtesy CBS News |
Two recent stories
continue to haunt me, as I’m sure they haunt the rest of the nation.
At a Pennsylvania high school, young Alex Hribal, age 16, greeted his fellow students one morning last
week by stabbing 21 of them with a set of kitchen knives. He also attacked a school security
officer. Four of his victims remain in
critical condition.
Tomorrow, the school
will reopen so parents and students can do a walk-through. The school plant has been cleaned and
sanitized of the blood and gore, but the fear, I’m afraid, will be much harder
to clean away. Classes begin on
Wednesday, but it is safe to say no one in the community will be the same again.
Hribal did not stand
out as a troubled teen before the rampage.
Mental illness does not necessarily broadcast its presence to the world
before bullets fly or steel flashes, bloodstained and corroded, in a school
hallway. There are sleepers out there,
psychologists warn us. Some of them
sleep in our homes with us. They are the
children we thought we knew, until the day without warning when they rise up
and act out. Then we are left to wonder
why. I still cannot believe there were
no signs from Alex before the morning of the knives.
Maybe his signs were
not so obvious, as they were with Sandy Hook school shooter Adam Lanza. He refused to communicate with his parents
except through email even when they were in the next room. He blacked out his bedroom windows with trash
bags and duct tape. One would think that
was evidence enough that the dam was about to break. We don’t know what his mother was thinking
because she was his first victim. In
this latest knife attack, the perpetrator did not give the kind of warnings
Lanza did.
Post-attack, it is
clear that Hribal will face the consequence of his actions, if he even comprehends
what he has done. If convicted, he faces
585 years in prison, which is a long time to think about things, or he may be
institutionalized to simmer away in his madness. Whatever happens, it is doubtful he will ever
see freedom.
The second tragedy
befell students about to graduate this spring, and was not the fault of an
insane kid carrying a gun or a knife. On
board buses headed for California State University at Humboldt in northern
California, five students and three chaperones were killed when a Fed Ex
tractor-trailer crossed the center median and struck one of the buses head
on. This is a tragedy without a clear
evil intent, but it is a horrific tragedy nonetheless, and equally
nonsensical. Many of these victims, only
a few months away from starting a new chapter in their lives, were severely
burned in the inferno, leaving both physical and mental scars that will last a
lifetime.
Graduation. The cusp of the rest of your life. Death should come for us in old age and include
a celebration around the casket for a life well-lived. Now we mourn what never will be, a life
aborted in its infancy. These kids never
had a chance to bud, much less flower in this burgeoning spring of their lives.
We have become inured
to the horror. The phone call from the
school administration, the state police, the county coroner, has become the
expected, not the exception. Tragedies
happen and we prepare for when, not if.
It is naïve to wish
events like stabbings and shootings and car crashes would never happen, or to
wish those lost souls alive once more. I’d
be happy to go back to the days when such events happened so infrequently as to
be the aberration they should be, the horrific anomaly instead of the more
commonplace events they have become. Now
we stagger, from tragedy to tragedy, anticipating this nightmare that has
become our reality. And we try to go on.
Very poignantly and tragically stated.
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