Books meme

How can I resist? Some friends of mine in another blog site have been passing this around, and though it’s nothing new, I can’t help but participate:

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.

2) Italicise those you intend to read (as in the book is bought and sitting on my shelf).

3) Underline the books you LOVE.

4) Strike out the ones you thought SUCKED.

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien

3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling

5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

6. The Bible (also, may I please add The Dhamapada? the Tao Te Ching? the Bhagavad-Gita? the Qur’an, which, though I’ve not yet finished it, is so far glorious?)

7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell

9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman

10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott

12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy

13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (most of the plays)

15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks

18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

19. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

20. Middlemarch – George Eliot

21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald

23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens

24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame (I need to re-read it)

31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens

33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis

34. Emma – Jane Austen (Why are the Austens separate?)

35. Persuasion – Jane Austen

36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (how is this distinct from the entire series?–see #33)

37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres

39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden

40. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne

41. Animal Farm – George Orwell

42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown [I’m proud I haven’t read this!]

43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving

45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

46. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery

47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy

48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding

50. Atonement – Ian McEwan

51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel

52. Dune – Frank Herbert

53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons

54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

60. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck (I’ve forgotten most of it–I should read it again)

62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt

64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold–part of my dissertation!

65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac

67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

68. Bridget Jones’ Diary – Helen Fielding

69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville

71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens

72. Dracula – Bram Stoker

73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett

74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson

75. Ulysses – James Joyce

76. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

78. Germinal – Emile Zola

79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

80. Possession – AS Byatt

81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker

84. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry

87. Charlotte’s Web – EB White

88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom (should I really admit to having read this? oh well–it was almost part of my dissertation, but I found a way to get rid of it)

89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton

91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad (are you reading this, Grey!?!?!)

92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery–and in French, no less!

93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

94. Watership Down – Richard Adams

95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute

97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas (I started it; I need to finish it)

98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare (again, how is this distinct from the complete works?–see #15)

99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl

100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

My eyes, they are strained

I’ve been going through my students’ online discussion posts this semester, looking at the statistics, and I think I’m about ready to collapse.

So far this semester, I’ve written 276 discussion posts. Many of them are short replies to questions or comments on other posts, but several have been lengthy essays. But that’s not the part that hurts my brain.

I have also read 1,218 posts this semester.

Of those, a full 999 were formal response essays, and while the average of all my classes was well below the required 600 words per essay, the posts did average around 400 words a pop, which is roughly a single typed page, double-spaced. That means, had I been reading these on paper, as if my students had turned them in during class, I’d have read almost 1,000 pages this semester.

And that’s only counting response essays. It doesn’t count the slew of questions, workshop group discussions, and pop-culture commentary my students also posted. It also doesn’t count their formal research papers.

If I count only the papers I received and read, and I assume an average of 3 pages per short paper and 8 pages per long paper (which is about what the averages were), I also read 1,124 pages of research.

And then there were my students’ research portfolios, full of abstracts and outlines and bibliographies and notes.

And their e-mails, sometimes as many as a dozen a day.

On top of all that, I also judged our campus Creative Writing contest, which added another 400 pages or so of reading, and I’ve been working with a student creative writing group (though I admit, I don’t always find time to read all their work), which has added another few dozen pages.

With all this, somehow I’ve managed to also stay on top of my New Yorkers, half my Shambhala Suns, and a few of my issues of One Story; squeeze in three books this semester; and regularly read several blogs and news articles, as well as every word of every issue of our student newspaper.

No wonder I’ve finally had to start wearing reading glasses once in a while.

Typos

I ought to put this on a stamp and keep it on my desk, so I can just slap it on a paper whenever I find cause:

“Typos are very important to all written form. It gives the reader something to look for so they aren’t distracted by the total lack of content in your writing.”
~ Randy K. Milholland, Something Positive Comic, 7-3-05

(This, courtesy of my dad. Was he trying to tell me something?)

Happy Passover!

Happy Passover (Hebrew: Pesach or Pesakh)!

National Nonviolence Week

Please visit this site. If you have a MySpace page, consider joining the group.

Happy Easter!


Catholic, Orthodox (Coptic, Greek, and Russian), and Lutheran views (which I’ve included for regional reasons and because Lutherism is one of the earliest–perhaps the earliest–of the Protestant denominations). If I’ve left out a doctrinal view you prefer, feel free to post it in a reply–I’d love to see some other beliefs.

San Francisco and Pop Culture

As I did in New York, I decided to write blog entries about my conference in San Francisco, so my students can see what I’m up to at these conferences (this one over Spring Break no less!). But this time around, my conference hotel is not offering free wireless, so I’m having to write these offline and post them later. Still, I’m dating them retroactively, so they’ll still reflect the intended date of the post.

Flying into San Francisco, I was more taken by the West Coast mountain-and-Bay scenery than I thought I would be, particularly with the sun high overhead but the Bay and low hills thick with gauzy fog. On the ground, I found the warm, breezy hills and meandering roads relaxing, the sight of all those thick evergreens and swaying palms oddly comforting, even as I realized that I was recognizing them only from film and television: I had been coddled and nursed by Hollywood, and now felt almost infantile in the presence of California. It was like the Chili Peppers song internalized, brought into an almost religious reality. Perhaps it was the BART subway train we rode from the airport to the hotel–it was hands-down the cleanest, most comfortable, most efficient rail system I’ve ridden so far; the seats are larger and softer than those on our plane from Madison!

Our hotel is downtown, in the center of a shopping and arts district that is home to what seem like hundreds of what my friend David Horsley calls “alleywalkers.” (I remain in the habit of calling them “homeless,” but in a personal essay titled “The Alleywalker,” Horsley argues that for many people who live on the street, a home is the least important of the things they are “less.” Therefore, he chooses to call them “alleywalkers,” a better descriptive of their lifestyles.) I’m used to encountering alleywalkers in my travels–I’ve become something of a magnet for them, often chatting with them for blocks as I walk to a restaurant or a reception or a bar and they follow, hoping without begging that I’ll hand them some change (which I often do, in exchange for the conversation). In Atlanta last spring, I actually followed a man more than a mile into the depths of back-alley Atlanta; he’d asked me to put him up for the night in a shelter, and rather than simply hand him the money, I chose to walk with him and see the shelter myself, in part out of curiosity, in part out of suspicion (I didn’t know what he’d really do with my money), and in part out of simple human companionship. He told me about his children in Florida, about his struggles to find work without a local permanent address, about his life on the street. When a gang of shadowy figures began crawling from beneath a distant overpass and making their way toward us, he stopped me and explained that we were entering a part of town dangerous for white people (he used the word “Caucasian”; he was African-American), and that on second thought, he’d feel better walking me back to my part of town. He didn’t ask for any money. I gave it to him anyway, along with my leftover Indian dinner, and he hugged me and offered again to walk me back, but I waved him off and wished him well.

Here in San Francisco, the alleywalkers are different, or at least, more open. I’ve seen more in just these several blocks than I have in all the other cities I’ve visited combined. Having so many in such close proximity, many camped out in front of the swanky downtown hotels and the pricey shopping centers hoping to catch wealthy tourists, I’ve had the opportunity to make some observations I had long assumed from pop-culture presentations of the homeless but had never fully encountered before. Here, many of the homeless have gathered into tight communities, small traveling congregations of friends and fellow beggars. Some of the lone wanderers carry signs and sit silent, as though in meditation or stoic repose; others try to sell trinkets made from found paper clips or woven bits of discarded thread, or hand out free community newspapers in hopes of a donation; others simply sleep, an empty Starbucks cup held loose in their hands. But the congregations conspire, they arrange themselves in lines to beg collectively or vote on representatives to follow shoppers and tourists, debate the amount to be begged and then allot the money they collect, like a church charity plate in reverse. As my wife and I walked down Market Street to the city’s public library–a regular pilgrimage in all new cities we visit–I overheard such a conversation, a stooped, bearded man in a dirty denim jacket explaining to his colleagues that he needed five dollars, the rest electing him to track down the money (and telling him he needed to get more than five dollars if he expected his share), at which point he tucked away the capless prescription bottle he’d been holding, stuck his long-reused plastic water bottle under one arm, and followed us across two streets and half a block, shuffling in a limp, rambling a barely coherent but clearly practiced narrative in hopes of getting our change.

I find such encounters difficult. The truth is, I often have some change to spare, and if I can do so safely, I’m always willing to offer a bit of help. But here, the alleywalker population is so dense that I can’t donate funds without revealing the money I have on hand, and–excuse though this may be–I worry about giving some money to some people while excluding the rest, and I certainly can’t afford to help out everyone. So I choose to help no one, often explaining–falsely–that I’d love to help out but I have no change. Everyone I’ve encountered seems to accept this, not as truth but as the code that it is: I have some change, but I don’t have enough, and I’m not going to give. No one has so far seemed offended. It’s just a part of the culture, a part of the dialogue of this place. It’s been an education for me.

The other thing I’ve encountered here, not for the first time but in the most open ways and in the greatest numbers, has been vocal activism of various sorts. On our way to the library, my wife and I watched the set-up for an anti-war protest we’d heard announced on the previous night’s news. On our way back, we strolled through an open market of vegetables, baked goods, and falafel vendors, and we wandered into the United Nations Plaza, where I met a young Tibetan woman handing out flyers about the Olympic torch and it sole stop in the US (in San Francisco), a Free Tibet tote slung over her shoulder and a quiet sadness on her lips, in her eyes. (I thanked her when I took the flyer then, once I saw what the flyer was, I turned and said, “Thank you very much!” but she’d already gone, gently pushing flyers at the crowd behind us.) When we got closer to our hotel, we got stopped by a small crowd of people, many with their cameras and cell phones raised to snap pictures. I cast about, unsure what was happening, but then I remembered–it was the protest, quieter than I’d expected because it was less angry march and more guerrilla theatre. On one side of the small square, a group of people in fake fatigues held cardboard machine guns aimed at hooded “prisoners” like the ones we held at Abu Ghraib or that we currently hold at Guantanamo or other “secret” prisons. In another corner, a man in a fishing vest displayed a Ken-doll Bush hung in effigy from a flower-wrapped fishing pole; behind him, signs were arranged like a bouquet in a large white bucket, with a note to “Return signs here.” Across the street, arrayed in front of Bloomingdale’s as though protecting the shoppers, a line of twenty police officers sat on blue-and-black dirt bikes like a street gang or a motocross team. Down an alley half a block away was a large police bus prepared to cart away arrested protesters.

Happy St. Patty’s Day!

St. Patrick

St. Patrick

(Plus, some fact vs. fiction.

Tibet

I’m in Chicago, working on my novel and some short stories and preparing for my reading at PCA/ACA next week while my wife attends an important Intellectual Freedom committee meeting with ALA. I plan to post about my pop-culture conference in San Fransisco, so I had intended to spend this week posting a preview of sorts, writing about my revision process and what I am doing to prepare for my presentation.

Instead, I find myself in tears.

I don’t like using this blog as a political platform, in part because I allow my students to read it and I don’t like propagating my political beliefs via this blog any more than I would do in my classrooms; I believe both should be open and available to the free exchange of ideas, which requires if not my silence then at least some semblance of my neutrality.

But I can remain neither silent nor neutral on this issue, and I feel I must share my thoughts here as I did when writing about similar anti-protest crackdowns in Burma just a few months ago.

For those readers — especially my students–who are unfamiliar with this news I’m referring to, here are some links:

I was (slightly) relieved to read yesterday that Prince Charles is planning to boycott the Beijing Olympics in protest over China’s Tibet policies–and that he’d announced that decision before the demonstrations. Talk of boycotting the Olympics is spreading, and I’d like more world leaders to step forward in this form of protest, because, as the Olympic Games are designed to represent the possibilities of human cooperation and friendly competition, it seems a travesty that this Olympiad’s events are taking place in so disharmonious a nation as China. If ever we needed a better demonstration of that travesty, the tragedies unfolding during these brave Tibetan protests are it.

Yet I am dismayed that the situation in Tibet has reached this point. (Full disclosure: I am a practicing — if poor — Buddhist of the Tibetan Mahayana tradition, and, having attended teachings from His Holiness and intending to attend more this summer, I consider myself one of his millions of students.) His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama, who is the exiled but beloved leader of the Tibetan people, has long called for what he calls the “Middle-Way approach,” resisting these sorts of violent protests and insisting on dialogue and compromise. While the Chinese government has for years claimed the Dalai Lama is a “separatist” causing unrest in the interest of Tibetan independence, His Holiness has remained steadfast in his insistence that he only wants autonomy within and with cooperation with the broader Chinese government system, in the interest not of preserving Tibetan nationalism or Independence but of preserving Tibetan religious beliefs and Tibetan culture (which the Chinese are systematically trying to stamp out). In his speeches on the situation in Tibet, His Holiness has consistently called for patience and compassion, which has frustrated a lot of young Tibetans who find patience difficult and resent the Dalai Lama’s “passive” (he would say “pacifist”) approach, and these riots, I fear, are the result of those young Tibetans’ pent-up frustrations bursting loose. This is not what the Dalai Lama wants, and it is not in the best interest of the Tibetan people.

Nevertheless, now that the violence has erupted, I think we need to make what good of it we can by calling attention to the frustrations of Tibetans and to the brutality of Chinese policy regarding Tibet. Through that, I hope, we can most quickly restore peace and begin the more productive process of restoring Tibetan autonomy and Tibetan cooperation with China. But to do this, we cannot relax our attention. So please, anyone reading this, try to stay on top of this story, these events, this long-standing political situation, and speak out — call or write our own government, which only several months ago awarded the Dalai Lama a special medal of recognition, and demand that we increase our pressure on China to show restraint in their dealings with Tibet and, ultimately, to work with the Dalai Lama to find the most beneficial compromise for everyone.

In the meantime, here is the official statement from His Holiness the Dalai Lama: http://www.tibet.net/en/ohhdl/statements/10march/2008.html.

Compassion from students

Last Thursday, when I read the first news reports of the shooting at Northern Illinois University — less than 150 miles from my campus here in Wisconsin — I started considering ways in which to address the situation with my students. My initial impulse was to dedicate the next class period to discussing the shootings and giving my students a chance to air their feelings, to share news, and to ask questions. I did the same thing ten months ago following the Virginia Tech shootings; I did the same thing six and a half years ago following the Sept. 11 attacks. But I realized last Thursday that one of my classes would not meet the next day, and the other four were scheduled to do group research in the campus library — we wouldn’t have a chance to discuss the shootings until the following (this) week.

So I jumped online to our web-based course site and set up a public discussion forum for my students to share their feelings in writing. Several did, almost immediately.

As I did last April following the Virginia Tech shootings, I set up a discussion forum in my classes’ online course material for my students to discuss their thoughts about the NIU shootings. The comments have been fewer than they were a year ago, but they have been interesting. A lot of my students knew people attending NIU, and the earliest comments were simply fears about their friends’ safety and requests for victim lists. Once they all knew their friends were safe (none of my students knew any of the victims), the conversation turned to general fears. One student, from a class in which we’d discussed violence in the media and its influence on serial killers, wrote at length about her concerns:

This is so scary. We were just talking about violence and what makes people kill in class on Wednesday and now this. I’m not going to lie . . . I am scared. I always make sure that I lock my door and I found myself sitting in my calc 3 class and thinking about how scary it would be if someone came in with a gun for no apparent reason, like these other shootings have been happening. I know it seems like, and I have been reassured many times, that it probably wouldn’t happen here at UWP, but that’s probably what the students at Virgina Tech thought and that’s probably what the students at NIU thought. The truth is that no one thinks it could happen to them until it does. Just thought I would contribute my fear and other feelings about the shootings.

Other students took the opportunity to write mini-essays on the subject, some of which I’ll include here, because I think their perspective is perhaps more relevant right now than mine:

This NIU incident comes at a quite interesting time. Just last week, my mother and I were talking about how time has evolved, and society really hasn’t. Somehow the topic went to suicide and how when people were depressed, they would take their own life, which is tragic in itself. As society evolves, troubled people seem to feel the need to take as many people with them as they can, when they are having trouble, and I would like to know what the point of that is.

[. . .] My heart goes out to all the families that have lost a loved one in this tragic event. It breaks my heart to know that something like this can happen to people who are just doing the right thing, by attending class. What I would like to know is what this world is coming to. I personally am scared to have children. How am I going to know that they will be safe? In parts of this country, you can’t go out on your front porch without the danger of being killed looming around you. Your children are suppose to be safe in school, but how can that statement even be made now-a-days when my high school is having bomb threats every other week, or there is college shootings . Can we even leave our houses? I’m truly scared for my children’s generation of people because they will all live a rough life. With the economy going the way it is, and all the violence, not only between Americans, but between different countries as well.

Some people will try to say that because of video games and TV shows these days the crime rates have grown. I don’t think that is the truth. I think that there is just the same amount of crime now as there was 50 years ago. The thing is, we have more laws, making more things illegal and therefore a crime. I personally think that the whole judicial system needs to be looked at, and reorganized.

I don’t think that laws that were in effect when Washington was president should still be present now. Times have changed and so should the system. I think that it is ridiculous that someone that is caught on a minor position of drugs sits in jail, while someone who has allegedly killed someone goes out on parole. I’m just one little person, whose voice may never be heard, but these things like the NIU shooting and the constant threats to schools, are not going to stop , and are only going to continuously get worse, unless something is done about it. I hope this problem is noticed and something is done about this, before it is too late.

Another student wrote the following:

It is very scary to hear about school shootings. Virginia Tech was tragic, but hard to grasp because I was still in high school, and my high school is very small. NIU is easier to relate to now that I am at a University. When I first heard of it I was walking back to my dorm and my mom was telling me about it on the phone. I was in shock. It was scary. I instantly wanted to get back and get online to see if I could find more information on it.

[. . .] It would be great to live in a world where you did not have to worry about doing something as simple as attending a lecture without having a crazy person come in and do something tragic like happened at NIU. It is scary to see how dangerous of a world we live in. However it is a good opportunity to step back and to evaluate our lives and to see if we are living them to the fullest. Live is too short and we never when it will be gone. The students went into their lecture hall, were just about ready to get out and then instantly young lives were taken. It is crazy and we need to make sure we all live our lives to the fullest with no regrets.

The only guy so far to join the discussion wrote this:

The question that I ask myself is why. Why would anyone want to take the life of others and take their own life? We live in a world where there are so many people you can contact to help you. In a lot of these situations the shooter is one who is having a hard time getting through life. [. . .] I can’t imagine what goes through a person’s mind when they feel they have to take someone’s life away. It’s very unfortunate to see this situation happen, and more than once. We have seen this in Colorado and at Virginia Tech last year. When something like this happens, it shakes up a community. It affects everyone in many different ways. It makes people scared and makes them feel very uncomfortable everywhere they go. It does make people not take life for granted, but something like this shouldn’t have to happen for people to see how valuable our lives are.

It’s hard to believe someone would do this under any circumstance. The world we live in is full of chances to succeed. Sometimes people can get lucky and score big, but most people have to work hard. These hard working people are usually rewarded. But yet some people feel it is not for them. Our lives are so very valuable. When someone loses their life, families and friends ask the question: why us? People’s lives are taken all the time, and the worst part about this situation is that no one way doing anything wrong. I’m not saying when you do something wrong your life should be taken. I just wish this individual would of stopped and asked himself why? I don’t know if the individual was mad at these kids for doing something, but there is no valid reason for taking someone’s life. There is just no reason. If someone makes you mad, just try your best to forgive them. No one wants to have that on their conscience. Maybe that is indeed the fact the shooter took his own life.

Another student wrote:

You always think that a school shooting will never happen to you or anyone close to you. Truth is it happens more often then anyone likes. When it’s someone you know that gets killed, things change meaning. Even if you don’t know them well. I don’t claim to know this person well at all. They were just a person that I would see every time I worked and that I would talk to. Her husband was the principle at Weston High School. I never knew that’s who her husband was until I went to work the day after and found out that it was her husband who was killed by the student. Now, Weston isn’t that far away from my home. I had played in basketball tournaments there since I was little and I had a lot of friends from there. So did everyone from my school. I had classmates that had transferred to Weston and vice versa, but on that day everything at school stopped. An announcement came over the intercom that the entire high school was in a state of lockdown. We had the TV’s on. We were all watching the news about it. There was a girl who had just transferred from there to my school not 2 weeks earlier. She was in tears. No one knew how many people were hurt but we were all called to the auditorium an hour after lock down. By then the whole school knew more than the teachers because of text messaging. Our friends from Weston were texting us telling us what was going on. At the massive assembly we found out that the principle was dead and that’s about all they knew. Class didn’t resume as normal that day or the days to follow. Neither did work. That lady that I always talked to wasn’t there. She was on the TV sobbing. She was in the court room fighting for justice to what had happened to her. She was doing everything she never wanted to do. I didn’t see her in person for 3 months. When she first came back you could tell she was different. She looked tired. Maybe that was how I viewed her, but she wasn’t the same. She was still the nice lady that always talked to me and made sure I stayed awake while I worked but I felt so bad. I wondered how anyone could ever do that. Can’t those people that kill others for no reason see the pain on the victims loved ones faces. Can’t they see what they are doing? They aren’t just tearing a person apart with bullets but they are tearing apart a family, a community, a county, a state, and the US.

NIU is just a subtle reminder to anyone that’s ever been close to a school shooting or been affected by a school shooting to remember the pain it causes everyone involved. NIU will never be the same neither will how people view it. The only thing that will change are the memories of the people that died and where they were that day and exactly what they were doing how they found out about it and who said what.

One girl wrote simply, “I do not know what scares me more: that school shootings are occurring more often, or that the shooter was an honors student that no one would expect to commit this horrible act. School shootings can occur anywhere.”

Then there is the girl who took a broader view of the situation:

The shootings at Northern Illinois University are just another in the ever growing list of incredibly horrifying episodes of violence that have plagued the United States going back to the shootings at Columbine High School in 1999. Hearing about the shootings is always scary and shocking, but sadly it isn’t as surprising as it once was. When the shootings at Columbine happened, the whole country went into a state of mourning. Ordinary citizens across the United States knew many of the names of victims that had died and sent countless numbers of flowers, letters, and prayers to the families of those who had died that day. Even now about nine years after the shooting if you hear the title, Columbine, most people immediately remember that day and remember hearing about that terrible tragedy.

Now, however, I feel that the citizens of the United States still feel that same sense of shock and sadness when a shooting like this happens but I think it’s not quite as profound. After a couple days the deep feeling of alarm and grief wears off and people continue with their daily lives and generally almost forget about what happened. For example, I know that there have been several school shootings in the years between Columbine and Northern Illinois and except for the instance at Virginia Tech, I can’t remember any specific examples. To me, this knowledge is both scary and sad. It tells me that we, as a nation, have had so many instances of school shootings that they have almost blurred together in my mind to the point where they all seem the same. Where I am able to remember specific names of the victims at Columbine, I can barely even name the specific city in which certain school shootings have taken place in the past couple years. It’s almost as if the school shootings aren’t as big of a deal as the once were. I think that sounds absolutely terrible because to the families and friends of the people who perish as a result of the shooting, the effects are astronomical and their lives are changed forever. However, for the rest of the people that aren’t affected as close to home, their lives seem to move on fairly quickly.

[. . .]

I feel that because this specific school shooting hit closer to home for me than what many of the others did, I will remember this one better. However for people who didn’t know anyone at the school or only briefly heard that there was another school shooting, they will forget it more easily. They will unintentionally disregard it as “just another school shooting” and go on with their daily lives as if something this terrible never occurred. In saying this I am not blaming American citizens for this. I feel that I am the same way (unless I am directly affected by what happened). However, I am simply stating the sad truth that because there have been so many school shootings in the past nine years we, as citizens, have almost forgotten how truly terrible a school shooting really is.

As for me, I’m not looking over my shoulder or trying to guess out any “weirdos” I might pass on the sidewalks. Instead, I try simply to process the news and to take what opportunities I can to help my students do the same, to try and teach them, within the limits of my curriculum and our class discussions, some degree of compassion. I also try to learn from them, to understand their perspectives.

And I agree with you about the issue of gun control: As in Texas, gun control is a very touchy subject here in Wisconsin, and most people don’t want to hear about it — they’re much too attached to their firearms. But in all these panicked questions about how we can prevent these scenarios from happening, the only logical answer is to remove the weapons that allow such mass destruction. We can invade on privacies and screen for mental health, we can arm our teachers and turn our campuses into locked camps or paramilitary compounds of “education,” but in the end, the only freedom it makes sense to restrict is the freedom to kill, and I am very much in favor in banning handguns and assault rifles and severely restricting all other firearms. Period.