VT Elegy

April 17~

This morning we all woke up wishing that yesterday’s tragedy was just a bad dream. Instead, we got ready for work feeling a little more vulnerable, hugging our kids just a little bit tighter, and trying desperately to make sense of it all.

For many of us, the bloody horrors at Virginia Tech served as a sudden and painful reminder that we live in a fallen world where man is capable of unthinkable evil. As the media hastens to report every raw detail and parents struggle to overcome the fears now rekindled from Columbine, we wonder if America–like Virginia Tech–will ever be the same.

Yet on a day scarred by sorrow and disbelief, there are still glimpses of selfless courage–men and women who, in the tradition of our great nation, paid the ultimate price to protect others. Students of Liviu Librescu are alive today because their professor used his own body to block a classroom doorway as the gunman approached. This hero, who survived the Holocaust only to give his life for his students, is one reason the death toll is not larger.

And there are countless others. Policemen who rushed the stairwells, carrying out wounded. Students who helped others leap to safety. And friends, whose only service was offering a shoulder for people to cry on.

As Benjamin Franklin once said, “Those things that hurt, instruct.” In a world where make-believe violence is entertainment, may Americans finally refuse to pay the real-life price.

In a country that seeks to silence God in its schools, may skeptics finally realize that on days like this, He cannot be shut out. I pray that as we carry in our hearts and in our prayers the memories of those lost, we also hold on to our hunger for goodness and virtue so that these innocent people have not have died in vain.

Tony Perkins heads the Family Research Council. This article was excerpted from the Washington Update that he compiles for the FRC.