Thursday, May 31, 2007
A few ideas to defenestrate
John Long
Recent columns
From the RoundTable blog
Let's call this feature "My Meandering Mind" -- some short observations and questions that aren't enough to fill a normal column, but are worth some consideration:
On the Tech shootings: It was the politically correct thing in the immediate aftermath to consider that there were 33 victims including the shooter Cho. He was, said the conventional wisdom, a "deeply disturbed young man," "a loner who didn't get the help he needed," etc.
Church bells in Salem pealed 33 times, a 33rd memorial appeared on the campus parade field. Yet when it came to less ephemeral commemorations, this conventional wisdom thankfully evaporated. At commencement no one proposed giving Cho a posthumous degree, as Tech did for those he murdered. No one is pressing the athletic department to retire the number 33. I guess in the end it's not so hard to distinguish between perpetrator and victim.
And did you notice the response of the Korean-American community to Cho's crime? They openly expressed not only regret but horror. Although I've heard no one blame them for the unthinkable misdeed, Koreans sat out Roanoke's Local Colors event out of sympathy for the victims' families; Korean-American groups have flooded Tech with memorial donations.
As the uncle of a student who missed professor Liviu Librescu's class that day, I say thank you to this wonderful community. The Muslim-American public would do well to follow your example the next time an innocent reporter is beheaded or a bus is blown up in the Middle East.
On ecology: Whatever happened to box turtles? When I was growing up in a middle-class Roanoke neighborhood, we saw them all the time, even caught two or three a summer to keep briefly as pets. Now I live in a middle-class Salem neighborhood, and I've seen one in more than four years. Have they become an endangered species?
On Hugo Chavez, liberal infatuation with: To me a lot of folks on the left seem to have a selective sense of outrage. They were indignant that the U.S. government might try to search library records or listen to the phone calls of known terror suspects. But when Venezuelan President Chavez, a darling of American liberals, shut down an entire television network this week because it wasn't supportive enough of his policies, I've barely heard a peep. Can you imagine the outcry if less "enlightened" leaders like France's new President Nicolas Sarkozy tried such a thing?
On reference books: I have a long-standing policy for evaluating a dictionary. I call it the defenestration test. No, I don't actually defenestrate the book; I look the word up. If it's in there, the dictionary probably has any other word I'll ever require. If not, I'll probably eventually go to look up another obscure word and find it isn't listed. For those of you who don't know what defenestration means, find a good dictionary.
On illegal immigration: In all the debates I've heard through the years on this topic, I've never heard an answer to this simple question: What would be the result if we just assiduously enforced the laws already on the books?
As to education in immigrants' native languages, can anyone name a single person who has been a success in America without being conversant in English? So if we fail to teach the children of new arrivals in English, aren't we preparing them only to fail?
On historical memory: We are now well into Virginia's yearlong commemoration of the 400th anniversary of Jamestown's founding. I worked with local committees planning 2007 events and know that preparation has been under way for years. But another major anniversary is just around the corner: 2011 will mark the 150th anniversary of the Civil War's outbreak. Yet as far as I know no planning has begun for marking the occasion on the local, state or national level. I've heard a rumor that congressional bills to start planning a commemoration have stalled because it's not the most politically correct subject to recall. Might Rep. Bob Goodlatte or Sens. John Warner or Jim Webb be willing to take the lead?
On World War II vets: I received a tremendous response to my recent column on collecting the oral histories of WWII veterans. A special note of thanks to the men's ministry of Windsor Hills Methodist Church in Roanoke, who invited me to sit in on a dinner in honor of the vets of their congregation. Twenty-one of them spoke about their wartime experiences, reminding me once again why they are called the Greatest Generation.
Long, director of the Salem Museum and a history teacher at Roanoke College, is a Roanoke Times columnist.
