Students at ETSU weren’t the only ones remembering the Virginia Tech community in the days since the shootings.
Students in war-torn Baghdad showed solidarity with the victims by hanging a banner outside of Baghdad Technology University.
“We, the students of Technology University, denounce the attack at Virginia Tech. We extend our condolences to the families of the victims who face a situation as bad as Iraq’s universities do,” it reads.
The banner doesn’t lie. Over 200 university professors have been killed since the United States invaded Iraq. There is no record of how many college students have been killed, but the number is sure to far exceed the number of professors.
Over 100 people were killed by bombings targeting college students in the first two months of 2007 alone. That’s only looking at college students. Bombings that kill two or three times as many civilians occur with regularity.
For a moment, stop and try to envision a Virginia Tech massacre happening, on average, once every other day.
Think back to how you felt once you began to comprehend the magnitude of the shootings. What if you had to feel that two or three times per week.
Now you can begin to empathize with the college students of Iraq.
It’s flabbergasting that students living with such violence on a daily basis would take the time to show sympathy for the families that lost loved ones in Blacksburg, Va. So why is it we don’t show the same solidarity for Iraqi students?
Why don’t we show the same concern for innocent blood spilled daily half a world away? It’s the same crazy fundamentalism driving people to commit mass murder in Baghdad.
It’s the same blood of innocents spilled in the name of a demented world view. So why don’t we cry for them? Is it because those deaths are too far away to mean anything? Is it because the vast majority of Iraqis don’t share the same religion as many of us?
Can we really claim ignorance because the corporately owned mass media sugar coats what’s really going on in the world?
If anything we should be weeping more. We may not be pulling the trigger every time a civilian is killed in Iraq, but no one can deny we lit the fuse that began the chain reaction of violence that rages in that country. And for what reason? For weapons of mass destruction?
That’s the (false) premise given for the invasion. But in reality, those weapons were never in Iraq.
They were right here in America all along. But we, completely oblivious to their presence, still don’t recognize them.
The real weapons of mass destruction, the ultimate source of the Virginia Tech like massacres that occur daily in Iraq, are you and me; the people whose votes enabled this war and the rest of us who sit by idly and let it continue.

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