NIU Moving Forward

The following column was published last year, days after the massacre on Valentine's Day at the DeKalb campus of Northern Illinois University. It is reprinted now as a memorial to those who lost their lives and as a tribute to those who continue to carry on despite the tragedy. God bless.


How Do We Understand the Incomprehensible?
By
Roland Tolliver

“It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style.” --Oscar Wilde

I’m tired of moments of silence, lighting candles and makeshift memorials. Don’t get me wrong. I understand the reason behind them, but I’m just mentally, emotionally and spiritually drained by the need for them. I’m tired of the senseless murders that are happening on our campuses and in our streets. I’m tired of feeling the tightening of the encompassing circle of death, especially as it comes ever closer to home. I’m tired of having to read headlines about deranged or mentally ill individuals who feel that they have to go out in “a blaze of glory” by taking innocent victims with them. Aren’t you tired of it, also?

This time it hit particularly close to home, not only geographically, but personally. One of my daughter Mary’s best friends was scheduled to be in that room for a 3:30 p.m. class. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of students from northwest Illinois attending Northern Illinois University. We keep hearing the refrain, “It isn’t supposed to happen here,” but it has and we feel helpless to stop it. We hear suggestions to arm the instructors or that we should allow concealed weapons, so that students can protect themselves. How? Do we have ROTC members standing in each class with rifles loaded and ready to defend our rights to be educated? Would the massacres at Virginia Tech or at NIU have happened if we had surveillance cameras in every classroom with guards standing ready to intervene?

I feel like I know the instructor who was shot and then chased by the gunman. I’ve known his grandmother for years and she has shared with me his many accomplishments in the world of paleontology. Joe Peterson is working towards his doctorate in a field that most of us probably don’t understand. His passion has been shown at the Burpee Museum and in the discovery and excavation and recovery of Jane, the dinosaur. He was married last summer and was settling into his academic life at Northern. His grandmother always speaks glowingly about him. She says that she doesn’t always understand what it is he does in paleontology, but she has always supported him. I can imagine that one of the last things she would have been worried about was that her grandson would find himself running for his life during a class. He was shot in the shoulder, but what kind of scar will actually be left, knowing that five of his students are dead. Five students who minutes earlier had probably been watching the clock looking forward to Valentine’s Day or to the weekend or just finishing class so they could go to the bathroom. Then all hell breaks loose and the only thing on the mind of more than a hundred students is, “How do I get out of here?” How does a teacher or anyone comprehend this?

What I’m sensing, and this doesn’t come from exhaustive psychosocial analysis, but from just a curiosity about human nature, is that we have moved into a phase of “disconnect” when it comes to this type of senseless killing. Have you noticed the way in which the killers burst into rooms with guns blazing and they start just wiping out innocent victims? Go back to Columbine or Virginia Tech and now to NIU and many other incidents in between and you have this vigilante mentality that permeates the killers. Now, look at the types of video and computer games that have been prevalent among the age-group that has been predominantly responsible for these attacks. These games, like Grand Theft Auto, often depict a person who has the ability to kill without conscience and when you are “killed” in the game, you just start over. I don’t know if the NIU killer was a “gamer,” like the Columbine murderers were, but there are frightening patterns developing among the ones who have killed so many of our students. Boys and young men, especially, seem to lose the ability to separate virtual reality from reality and when one adds mental illness into the equation, it becomes even more volatile.

NIU’s president, John Peters, was very forthcoming in a press conference the day that these innocent students were slaughtered when he said that sometimes there is just no way of preventing this type of tragedy from occurring. When someone is determined enough, they tend to find a way to carry out their plan. And it had to have been planned for him to sit in a hotel room in DeKalb for three days, to purchase the guns in advance, to mail the items and the letter to his girlfriend, and then to proceed to the lecture hall with the concealed weapons. Mental illness or not, he had the wherewithal to follow through with his plan.

How does a bright individual like a Kazmierciak or even a Kaczyinski go from amicable to annihilator of human life? What mental buttons are pushed that lead to such a drastic and tragic transformation? How can one person say he was “just the sweetest guy” in retrospect when he has just blown away unsuspecting people in such a cavalier way? What are we missing here? What piece of the story doesn’t make sense? How do we get to the underlying questions in everyone’s minds: “Why did this happen?”; “Why does it keep happening?”; and “What can we do about it?’

There are no immediate answers, just like there are no easy answers. Those that have stained our innocence often leave us clueless, because they take their own lives before any answers are forthcoming. Those that are left behind, like Joe Peterson, the wounded, those that escaped, and the families of victims are left to painfully ask, “Why?”