So.

Virginia Tech.

I, like everyone, have been reading the articles and watching the news and taking it all in. I don’t really have anything to add that hasn’t already been said a thousand times in a hundred different ways. It’s difficult, damn near impossible, for me to wrap my head around it. It actually makes my brain hurt.

Yesterday evening, Emily asked me what we’d do if the shootings had happened at UVM and not at Virginia Tech. Would we still go? And the answer, of course, is yes. The answer is yes because there was never anything intrinsically dangerous about Virginia Tech. There was nothing that made a tragedy of this magnitude somehow statistically more probably in Blacksburg as opposed to Burlington or any other college town in the country.

The simple sad fact is that there was no meaning behind yesterday. There was no ‘why’. And thus yesterday could have happened anywhere. It will happen somewhere again.

It’s up to us to grieve and then re-shoulder our lives and get on with things. We can’t predict where disaster will strike and to pretend otherwise leads to us paralyzed by fear, hiding in our closets.

As scary as it is, the only thing we can do is move forward.