In the wake of the shootings at Virginia Tech, we asked a number of scholars, college presidents, and writers to answer this question: If you were giving the commencement address at Virginia Tech this year, what is the core of the message you would like to leave with the graduates?

Amy Gutmann | Michael Eric Dyson |Ariel Dorfman | Lionel Shriver | Edward J.W. Park | Donna E. Shalala | Barry R. Glassner | Sissela Bok | Robert Coles | Karla Jay | Bobby Fong

April 20, 2007

Karla Jay, professor of English and women's and gender studies at Pace University

Help Those You Fear: How can you ever forget an alma mater where more than 30 of your fellow students and faculty members died violently? How can you ever leave behind the popping of bullets and the face of the killer burned into every cell of your brain? How do you go on from here?

I asked myself similar questions when I returned to Pace University after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center destroyed part of our campus in Tower One and vaporized 40 of our students and alumni. All that is left of them is a large ragged wound where the buildings once stood, a commemorative plaque in the university’s courtyard, and visions of the buildings imploding over and over in the dreams of almost everyone who witnessed the event.

Survivors never escape the fragility of life or the knowledge that we could have been victims as easily as anyone else, had the site shifted by a building, had the tragedy happened an hour later, or 10 minutes earlier. At the moment of tragedy, we are sure that life will never be the same. Ironically, for most of the students, faculty, and staff at Pace in 2001, life has gone on much as before. Students go to class, professors grade papers, and administrators assess it all. We still date, marry, divorce, have children, take on new challenges, and lose loved ones in time-worn ways.

Yet life after 9/11 has never been the same, and nor should it be for you after the murders on your campus. For me personally, life has become more meaningful. I have continued my work as an activist, but I no longer see academe and “community” as two separate entities. Now many of my courses involve outreach to immigrants, battered women, people with HIV and cancer, the elderly, and others. I stress to my students the need to move beyond our fears and reach out to people who are different from us.

Those who witness senseless violence can never forget, must never forget, for if we do, then the victims will have died in vain.

So, too, can the graduating and current students of Virginia Tech, including the more than 700 members of its cadet corps, now understand how violence and terror affect the innocent. More than 200 Iraqis, also guiltless bystanders, were blown up the very same week of the murders at Virginia Tech in senseless, brutal acts of terror. While you were attending classes, Iraqis shopped for food. Are the two worlds so very different? If we treat individuals or groups of people as our enemies, those people have no choice but to be our enemies. If we hate them, they will demonize us. We cannot kill or simply ignore the weirdos at home or the people whose ways we don’t understand abroad. We can never look away from or ignore such people again. In the end, we must do the hardest thing — help those we fear, so that we may live in peace.

Prayers may help the dead, but both faith in humanity and positive action can heal us all.

Comments

1. I agree and was especially moved by the line “...we must do the hardest thing – help those we fear…”. It begins very early in life. Just be kind. Not necessarily ‘happy’ all the time, not to necessarily go out of your way to ‘do’ somrthing for someone. Just be kind. First.

   — Mom2three    Apr 24, 12:05 PM    #

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