It seems as though the preferred way to end your life nowadays is to get your hands on a gun, take it to the nearest institution of higher learning, shoot as many people as you can with it, and then take your own life. Given that I spend a significant amount of time lecturing in front of university students these days, this trend has not escaped my notice. Yesterday, this trend struck a little too close to home. I was working in my office when I received a broadcast email from the university’s administration. Someone had scrawled a message, a message threatening violence with a weapon, on the wall of the men’s restroom located on the floor below my office. A prank? Probably. There are a lot of people between the ages of 18 and 25 around here, and some of them can’t tell a good prank from a bad one. A seriously disturbed person planning the worst? Possibly. Nowadays, you can’t shrug these things off. The university, of course, took the threat seriously and had cruisers patrolling the campus nearby and officers walking the building. This morning I received an email from the administration saying that the time frame outlined in the note had passed. For some reason, I’m not all that comforted by it.
3 thoughts on “Dangerous Profession?”
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It is frightening to realize just how vulnerable we all are all the time… obvious threat or not, we just don’t have as much control over our lives as we like to think…
Be comforted that you and your family and friends are held in the palm of a loving God.
Thanks for posting this reflection. Being in an institution where the president has received death threats and doesn’t go anywhere without security, I think about safety quite often.
In our world where many theories of education rationally lead to nihilism, and with students who have grown up in suburbia where mommy & daddy kept them from getting a scrape on their knee and told them they were the best, and their aim is to pursue a life of comfort that they ultimately find is illusive and elusive, I’m not surprised people blast away at people and then turn the barrel on themselves. As the great philosopher Qoheleth taught: It’s all meaningless, a chasing after the wind.
I agree. We don’t have as much control over our lives as many of us think we do. And if I wanted my worry to track what is likely to happen to me, I should probably be more worried about getting into a fatal car accident than being a victim in a school shooting.