Perspective...
The first graders and kindergartners loved the sidewalk chalk project and other than smearing their faces with blue chalk dust, I would say the afternoon was a success. I managed to safely get them upstairs, outside, engaged in a project, lined-up and back inside without too much drama. We even played hop-scotch. I was enjoying the beautiful afternoon completely unaware of hearts breaking around the world. For that hour I was grateful to be a teacher.
The fight bummed me out and even made it hard for me to eat (a real shocker). I evaluated my response the whole way home...didn't even listen to talk radio, like I normally would. I took a cat nap on my couch (with my cats) and quietly processed my busy day. Robbie came home and informed me that, once again, things would be different, and once again, we were reminded that there is evil in the world, and that once again, our perspective of an event can dramatically change in an instant. Suddenly, my day wasn't nearly as hard as it could have been.
From
Liviu Librescu
One victim of the Virginia massacre left an incomparable legacy
The last person to see Professor Liviu Librescu alive appears to have been Alec Calhoun, a student at Virginia Tech who turned as he prepared to leap from a high classroom window to see the elderly academic holding shut the classroom door. The student jumped, and lived. Minutes later, the professor was shot dead.
There is no meaningful distinction between one relative’s grief and another’s sorrow as the bereaved converge on Blacksburg from as near as Roanoke and as far as India. But it is worth reflecting on the significance of Professor Librescu’s life of quiet heroism, which encompassed the Holocaust, a career of internationally admired teaching and research, and a final act of sacrifice that saved at least nine other lives.
The son of Romanian Jewish parents, he was sent to a Soviet labour camp as a boy after his father was deported by the Nazis. He was repatriated to communist Romania only to be forced out of academia there for his Israeli sympathies. A personal intervention by Menachem Begin enabled him to emigrate with his wife to Israel, from where he visited the US on a sabbatical in 1986, and chose to stay. The appalling ironies of his murder by a crazed student after a life of such fortitude and generosity will not be lost on anyone who hears his story.
Yet neither should those who mourn him forget the role that America played in his life. As for so many other survivors of the mid-20th century’s genocidal convulsions, the US was for this inspiring teacher both a beacon of hope and a welcoming new home. Founded on the idea of liberty, it also made, for him, a reality of that idea. Let those he saved now make the most of it.
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