19 April 2007
Walk in the Rain
It is going to rain today, and I will be walking a mile from my car to the conference in the big aluminum building on the East side of the Potomac. It is a relief that for the first time in a week the weather is significant enough to be the thing to worry about, but of course, that is just here in Washington.
Inside the big shiny building You would think that what with the critical national security mission they conduct inside the walls of the structure the first topic of interest would be the wars, but it is not. It is the lack of parking on the sprawling base, and how far the junior employees and contractors have to walk to work. Naturally, it is worse in the rain.
I heard the Director talk about it yesterday morning. He said he talked to one of his guys in Afghanistan, and the kid said he was not coming back until the parking was fixed.
The human mind being what it is, we were all happy to laugh at an eternal and ironic problem. Maybe it is apocryphal, but the legend feels correct. They say the Building was an experiment in human engineering. They deliberately constructed it with insufficient parking for the number of employees in order to encourage car-pooling.
If it is true, then the scheme was another of those high-minded and small-spirited things for which President Carter is so famous.
No one talked about the killings it at the conference, which surprised me, since it was a conference about killings. The murders were so fresh that the scab had not fully formed yet, and if the slaughter at Virginia Tech wasn't an act of terrorism, I am hard-put to understand what one is.
They were just delivering the multi-media package to NBC at Rockefeller Center as the Director joked about the parking situation, and it was all over the news by the time we got out of the building and were able to turn on our cell-phones again.
Too much information. I did not need to see the pathetic bravado of the photos, and no one else did, either. It is only going to encourage some other loser to make his mark. There is plenty more, and I registered it as I sat in snarled traffic trying to get back across town in the late afternoon.
I had all the information I needed. Mr. Cho had been committed before, it turns out, and he should have stayed locked up. That is the way things used to be, before “indefinite sentencing” due to mental incapacity was declared unconstitutional.
That is when the mental asylums flushed out, and the American downtown areas acquired permanent new human scenery. They let my orthodontist walk free from the Michigan Home for the Criminally Insane. He was a nice guy, and quite the outdoorsman, at least when he stayed on his meds and was not shooting his family.
I'm bitter and mad at NBC for showing the images. It gives him the last word, or rather hundreds of them. I know at least one of the photos is going to be an icon.
It was enough for me to learn that existing laws and procedures should have worked.
Cho should not have been able to purchase the guns under existing law.
The cops should have locked down campus until they were sure they had the right guy. They didn't.
Cho should have stayed committed the first time.
It is sickening and sad, but that seems to be the way of the world these days.
Pressed into a corner by the increasing security, the criminal scum in Iraq are responding with waves of murder that is orders of magnitude beyond what happened in Blacksburg.
Five massive explosions killed at least 171 people in the worst day that Baghdad has seen since the new security plan went into effect two months ago.
All those kids. And I am worried about getting wet after a long walk. This is nuts.
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com