No one deserves a tragedy

Nikki Giovanni's Convocation address:

We are Virginia Tech.

We do not understand this tragedy. We know we did nothing to deserve it, but neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS, neither do the invisible children walking the night away to avoid being captured by the rogue army, neither does the baby elephant watching his community being devastated for ivory, neither does the Mexican child looking for fresh water, neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of the night in his crib in the home his father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because the land was destabilized. No one deserves a tragedy.

We are Virginia Tech.

On a different note, the gunman was initially identified as "foreign", then "Asian", then "South Korean" (who could barely speak English??!!!). Washington Post identified him as a "Fairfax man" in a couple of posts. The majority of press now just says "the gunman". KQED's Pacific time has an interesting story on the reactions when he was pronounced "Asian".