The murder of at least 32 students at the Virginia Tech campus in the United States today is a tragedy of a proportion that I cannot even imagine. I am not a stranger to death: I lost my own wife a little over five years ago. But, it is still not possible for me to imagine how much grief the Virginia Tech tragedy will cause, in part because one can never imagine the grief of another, but mostly because it never should have happened.
With events like this, and with the incomprehensible molestation of children around the world, how we can possibly ever dream again of Utopia? It seems to me that we are deluded in believing in the concept of progress. Oh, our technology will continue to improve. Some of the students who were murdered today could have helped bring that about. Without them, others will still bring about some technological improvements. Sociological “progress” seems to be an entirely different matter, though. I’m not convinced we’ve progressed much in this area over the past 5,000 years, and today I really have no hope that we will in the next 5,000 either.
