One year ago today I was teaching at a small liberal arts college in the Shenandoah valley of Virginia. I remember my friend coming in and telling me that there had been a shooting at Virginia Tech just a few hours down the road. I remember going off to class thinking what a sad thing that was, only to return to my office to discover that one shooting had become chaos. Thirty-two people were shot by one gunman who then took his own life. Thirty-three deaths in all, but many more victims than that exist.

I think we still don't know why senseless killings like the Virginia Tech shooting happen. I hope one day these grotesque Acts of violence in our country will cease to exist...

We do not understand this tragedy. We know we did nothing to deserve it, but neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS, neither do the invisible children walking the night away to avoid being captured by the rogue army, neither does the baby elephant watching his community being devastated for ivory, neither does the Mexican child looking for fresh water, neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of the night in his crib in the home his father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because the land was destabilized. No one deserves a tragedy.
(Part of a convocation speech on campus at Va Tech on April 17, 2007)