Wednesday, April 25, 2007
A shining life against death's darkness
Elizabeth Strother
Recent columns
- For those who have too little
- Time to gather mountain views
- Our blind spot on roads
- Following the money trail
From the RoundTable blog
Our job, my colleagues' and mine, is to try to make sense of what happens in the world and offer our meager insights into how what is bad might be made better.
There is no sense in what happened last week at Virginia Tech.
And in the first raw days after it happened, horror and anger as much as confusion about what happened -- the details of how it happened -- left me with nothing to say about how we now might make the world better. How do we retrieve something good or at least useful from a mindless tragedy?
The only good that can come from the irreparable loss of lives wrongly taken, of course, is whatever lessons one mass murder might offer to try to prevent the next.
History tells us there will be a next.
Still, I could hardly begin to discern from last week's chaos what its lessons should be. A sadly long list of school shootings in the recent past tells me there are no simple answers. And the usual arguments were frustratingly inadequate when the latest victims were just down the road at Tech.
I had to look instead for some balm for the soul, some insight that might offer hope to people who had suffered an irretrievable loss. I found hope in the life of Liviu Librescu.
Librescu is the 76-year-old engineering professor who blocked the door to his classroom in Norris Hall to give students time to jump out windows and escape Seung-Hui Cho's methodical killing spree. The deranged student shot and killed Librescu, but not before some of his students got away.
The teacher's heroic death is inspiration enough to remind me that humanity's unfathomable capacity to do evil is balanced by an equally astonishing capacity to do good. But I found more meaning in Librescu's life than in his death.
Librescu was a Romanian Jew who survived the Holocaust. He had witnessed murder on a massive scale that made no more sense than the shootings that broke the complacent routines on a normally peaceful campus in the sheltering folds of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
And Librescu had not merely survived a Nazi labor camp; he then lived a long and full life that included a marriage that lasted 42 years and produced two sons, resistance to Romania's post-World War II communist regime, emigration first from Romania to Israel then from Israel to the United States, and a career as an internationally respected aeronautics engineer.
By his wife's account, he was a kind man, a testament borne out by the selflessness of his final act.
Killers take lives and give the survivors affected by their crimes an unwanted knowledge of evil and its randomness. It seems to me that firsthand knowledge of the worst that people can do might shatter forever that trust in the basic goodness of humanity that we need for our peace of mind.
Librescu did not live as a shattered man, though. There is a triumph there. And when, decades later, a deluded young man was breaking down the door to his classroom, Librescu fought for his students' lives with all the intelligence and strength he had. He had experience of evil. He showed us something there, too.
History assures us that the world has not witnessed the last genocide. Nor, I fear, have we in America wept over the last mass murder, by guns, bombs or whatever deviltry someone intent on wreaking havoc can devise.
We have to throw ourselves, all our strength and intelligence, against it. Knowing evil will exist as long as humankind exists is not reason for despair, but for taking up the fight against it, where we can, and living as good a life as we can, in defiance of fear.
Virginians and other Americans quite properly will respond to the Tech shootings by trying to prevent such a thing from happening again. Policymakers and pundits, interest groups and interested individuals will study and debate what to do -- about guns, mental health, campus security, individual rights, public safety. Some of the arguments have begun.
And we all will do this in full knowledge that no policies, however wise, will guard against every permutation of evil. Civilization must do what it can. But public policy cannot change the human heart.
So last week, I found some comfort in musing instead on a life.
As a young man, Liviu Librescu lived while around him hundreds of thousands of his countrymen died. He took the gift of his life and used it fully. A measure of its worth is that, in the end, he sacrificed it so that other young people could have a chance, too, at long and productive lives.
He must have been a great teacher. He has shown the way.
Strother is on the editorial board of The Roanoke Times.
