Duck Pond on the Virginia Tech campus in Springtime

In pictures the grass was Kelly green and spring flowers were in bloom. Historic buildings were bathed in the spring sunshine. What seemed horribly incongruent in all this were the images of police carrying out bloodied students from Norris Hall at Virginia Tech University Monday morning. Thirty-two are dead after a lone gunman entered a dorm and several classrooms, shooting over 50 people.

All we can glean from eyewitness accounts, make that terrified eyewitnesses, is that a young Asian man in his 20s entered the classrooms and without a word began firing off shot after shot, killing the sons and daughters, husbands and wives of families all over the United States. And for what? Payback? A relationship that went sour? Mental illness? Will we ever know?

All I know is that violence seems to be an epidemic in this world. Everyone has a reason to lash out and harm others. Power. Money. Hate. Anger. And the list goes on. The solution? As simplistic as it seems, the Golden Rule seems to offer the most sense. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. This rings true for the sane among us, but for folks like David Koresh, Adolph Hitler, Kim Jong Il, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (Iranian president) or Joseph Stalin, their twisted reality is painted with a different brush stroke.

My son, who is a senior at UW Madison is understandably depressed about the news from Blacksburg, Virginia. Virginia Tech has over 100 buildings on its 2,600-acre campus where 25,000 students are educated each year. Nestled along the shores of Lake Mendota, UW Madison is sprawled out over 933 acres and has over 220 buildings that are filled each day by the 41,466 students enrolled in its programs. That’s a lot of students on the 159-year-old campus at any given time. And for a madman with a gun, that’s a lot of vulnerable people.

So I can understand why he’s not up about his upcoming birthday this week. Take a look at these dates: April 19, 1995; April 20, 1999; and April 19, 1993. These are the dates of the Oklahoma City bombing, the Columbine High School massacre and the end of the Davidian Branch cult stand-off in Waco, Texas, that claimed the lives of 4 police officers and 90 men, women and children inside the compound. I assured him that his birth was a red-letter day that week in the history of the world. I hope he believes me like he used to when he was little. When I told him that most people were inherently good, not evil. Now I’m not so sure.