21 people were claimed victims in a brutal shooting directed at students and faculty on the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, VA. It appears that the attack took place in two firings, two hours apart. By the second hour, several students thought the safety precautions were lifted. This is when the second round of shootings took place.

8 years after Columbine, after the snipers in DC, after the clocktower, today...well, what more can be said?

There's a lot to be said. I'm not someone that gets involved in political affairs easily. I'm not someone who wants to decipher right and wrong, the just and the immoral, or any of the great unknowns. Socially, I've since adopted a similar approach. Although I am known to be quick to judge on most occasions, often working off of instinct, that does not apply to serious matters. Hot button issues like gun control, the Israeli/Palestine conflict, war, and the death penalty are what we coined them to be because there is no way to correctly and accurately argue in favor for or against it. In doing so, I am, in effect, waging my own individual war. The fire that I cultivate to fight for something is part of the same driving force behind enemy lines.

I'm not concluding that the solution is to sit in apathy and sap myself of drive, fever, or conviction. There's much more involved.

We have been given a strange blip in the history of human existence. Within these precious years, this slice, this period, this era, we are so fully saturated with knowledge, that the moral high ground is no longer the foothill of the past. The peak has gradually become increasingly difficult to summit. At least in the past so much was based on the reasoning of protection against or fear of the unknown. Now, as it has been for several years, we wallow in the information wherein the danger lies.

As I've been busy looking at the news, mostly of a trivial nature to satisfy my mean streak, it has become abundantly clear that media outlets, big and small, are clouded over. What perspectives can I form that haven't been manipulated and taken into account in advance? Is there a way around it? No, not really. I guess in the end, it is my personal responsibility to tread with a necessary level of awareness, not lightly, or cautiously, in fact, quite the opposite. Always stride but keep my wits about me.

There's not much that I have said that hasn't been said time and time again in every culture. It's not a rant or a manifesto or a sermon, but a personal reiteration that I've decided to let open because I know it's not an uncommon thought.

Today, and every single day, something in the world has gone awry. But something about these recent transgressions have struck a cord with me. There is nothing to deny and no one to take the blame. It is just human tragedy.

I guess I have been overly cliche on so many levels but the fact of the matter is that "cliche" is "commonplace." If enough people at this same moment share similar fleeting thoughts, then I'm secure in the notion that things aren't as askew as I thought when I first started.