Virginia Tech with Seung-Hui Cho. Norway with Anders Behring Breivik. Sandy Hook Elementary with Adam Lanza. Paris with Saïd and Chérif Kouachi. And now Chapel Hill with Craig Stephen Hicks. Another senseless attack. Another series of lives snuffed out for no good reason.
No matter the killer’s motive, three bright young students who had their entire lives ahead of them are dead. It gets to be that when I hear about events like this, I don’t even pay much attention anymore. It’s not that I’m desensitized or cold or that I don’t care. It’s that I just have heard it too many times.
But even as I wrestle with cynicism, with hopelessness, with discouragement, with anger, with sadness — whatever this is that I feel when I keep hearing about these senseless attacks — I am relieved just a bit when I see the efforts of ASU students from six different organizations coming together in solidarity for a beautiful vigil for Deah Barakat, Yusor Abu-Salha and Razan Abu-Salha. It's a relief to see Muslims, Jews, Buddhists and Christians come together on Hayden Lawn not as enemies on a battlefield but as humans mourning the loss of wonderful additions to the world.
It is relieving when I hear Zana Alattar, the president of Students Organized for Syria at ASU, talking about how those three "were an inspiration, they were leaders.”
Alattar couldn’t stress enough that we need to look at the lives that these young people lived, not the deaths that the experienced. We should focus on the causes that they fought for and the example that they demonstrated on a daily basis as volunteers and exemplary students, rather than on the tragic and violent end that they met on Tuesday.
When I talked to Alattar after the vigil, she was quick to advocate for unity from diversity. She talked about how the vigil was put together by diverse on-campus groups, and how this was an example of what ASU has done and can continue to do to promote understanding of the issues and education about other cultures and religions.
I want to go beyond people coming together just to talk and educate about these issues. I also heard from Anusha Abbas, a member of Sun Devils Are Better Together, another organization on campus. She spoke to me about how extremism is a festering problem, especially among the youth. She highlighted how young people are being attracted by the extremism of other groups, like ISIS and al-Qaeda, and how these groups are radicalizing them due to the media’s attention on the successes of attacks. She spoke on the need for this to be counteracted by the youth of American and of ASU by coming together against extremism and violence and actually having it highlighted.
She pointed out that only death, destruction, violence, and negativity is highlighted in the media of late, rather than the efforts of peaceful and positive influences, an example being what happened last night at the vigil. What I began to realize is that this is a societal problem, one that encourages violence and conflict — a society that is more fascinated by Call of Duty than Tetris, and more with paintball than volunteer work.
Perhaps what I am trying to express was said best by one of the posters at the vigil: “All Lives Matter.” That is something that we all need to understand. Once we begin to focus on people as humans, rather than as adherents to a religion, members of racial group or activists in an organization, we will be able to reach out more effectively to each other as humans and stop these kinds of attacks, or at least extremely limit the kinds of ideas and doctrines that make them possible.
Reach the columnist at jbrunne2@asu.edu or follow @MrAmbassador4 on Twitter.
Editor’s note: The opinions presented in this column are the author’s and do not imply any endorsement from The State Press or its editors.
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