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(a parenthesis)

For some it happens every so often to see the "great history" from within a sequence of their lives. It was three o'clock in the afternoon and I heard my voice asking a young mother, standing before a giant screen of a library public, asking what was going on at Virginia Tech . He did not know. Even the television commentators and their guests knew it. The mother had moved away with her children, looked tired, dazed by a number of images and words that could not metabolize, a policeman had taken his place beside me.
Back in college, referring to colleagues to friends and family in Europe I bounced their way, thanks to satellite TV, but the response was unexpected, disinterest and fatigue, that feeling or rather complex called grief and demands respect , silence and suspension of all proceedings. Return to work.

"Nothing is so insufferable to man as being in complete rest, without passions, without worries, without entertainment, without application. Then feels his nothingness, his abandonment, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness. Immediately from the bottom of his soul will be out of boredom, gloom, sadness, anxiety, vexation, despair. "(Blaise Pascal, fr. 131).

The pictures continue to flow before my eyes, while I carry out my critique of pure reason. Grief, is a feeling for something serious happens to other . I know for sure that the students were killed, 22 were said after seven hours; Today, only three days away, it appears that a young Asian, twice, almost two and a half hours of each other, had committed a massacre in higher proportions than that of Columbine. Two and a half hours of blackout, two and a half hours of paralysis in a country setting in motion. Just as September 11. I hear the explanations of the commentators. They all have something in common. In a country of 300 million people, in which there are at least ten thousand different reasons why a thing happens, the event took place and the story is done regularly on all screens. Mysterious as the death of Ayrton Senna or the sinking of the Titanic. So many people die on the streets or from cancer. Point. The reasons are a thousand, all possible and plausible: the fault of Republicans, Democrats, corporations, lobbies, whites, blacks, yellows, Midwest, California, brought to the America, the United States. My grief prevents me from stopping to these reviews, which may be partly true. The pictures show me

students fleeing, military moving between the walls of a campus, just like my quiet. A prestigious polytechnic, in a country where education is second only to justice in the hierarchy of values. In fact, it's like to have fired into the church, and this is a sacrilege, have affected and vulnerable beings full of life, who were there to be educated the magnificent destiny of technological progress. The words tell of love affairs, political, social, built through a conspiracy ... and gradually dissolves their meaning.

"The only thing that consoles us for our miseries is fun, and while this is the greatest of our miseries. Why is it that mostly prevents us from thinking of us and leads us inadvertently to perdition. Without it we would be bored, boredom, and this drives us to seek a more solid to get out. But the fun we inadvertently strays and brings us to death. "(Pascal, fr. 171).

I see pictures and do not understand what they mean. Of course, a tragedy like this could happen only here,
because for better or for worse, this is the American system, that after high school you away from a family that is often absent (and here, in full knowledge of Because, I speak of "Imitation of families"). Here am I all of a sudden the line between what is proper to a culture with its values \u200b\u200band limitations and that concerns us all, from all sides of every ocean.

"I tried to do fil m simple and sincere, with characters who are human and real: they are not puppets, but real people. They speak English but they could speak turkish, Italian or Swedish may be as American as Europeans "(Frank Capra)

Cho Seung Hui, who will remain in history as" anti-social student, eventually killed 32 people, mainly most guys who try to rebuild their identity and ask how they should live this life. And I want to live this life with their friends. He did it in States and could do this only here. I always see in the background Mom looks disoriented the national catastrophe, something all too obvious, but basically sensible. The counterpoint to a place that is humanly achievable becomes, under the law a possibility all at the same time, the moral compasses are infinite and unquestionable, because a small private court. At the same time, this can not be stored as an American story. In that mother discouraged that her children away from videos and verbose in those journalists, in this campus where a fool can wander undisturbed for three hours under the eye of the cameras and the police, and only him to decide when it's time to leave the scene taking his life, contains the entire mystery of the whole human life. "America was born in the streets," was the slogan of a film focusing on the violence of the early life in New York. My mind often so rational, can not to stop at this point. Some phenomena occur here earlier than in other regions because it is the center of the empire: but the story has a broader scope, and the one that worries my European friends, and gives a huge respect those who sacrificed their lives for their friends at VT, a security with the heroism of so many victims, in front of the banality of evil that has crept silently into our private stories and those of the reports which claim unnaturally change the rules. The applicant barbarism of reason. It's so fashionable to quote Hannah Arendt and the banality of its evil, almost a balm ...

I realize that for a few hours, two thoughts intersect in my mind, as two characters. One I know him well, runs fast, talks a lot and now has slowed down: he would like an explanation, and a fault, and that deprives the guilty fear that makes them run so fast. A legitimate fear, because evil is real.

"We are never as far as the present. We anticipate the future as if it were too slow in coming, as if to hasten its course, or recall the past to stop it, almost too hasty, we are so imprudent to run about in times that do not belong to us and not to think the only time that belongs to us, we are so fatuous to dream about the time that no longer exist and escape without reflect upon it, the only one there. Because, usually, this haunts us. [...] So, do not ever live, but we hope to live, and, having always to be happy, it is inevitable that it will become ever. "(Pascal, fr. 172)

L 'Another thought, a character often taciturn and distant that I have a hard time understanding, continue to observe the scene. It prevents the other to take shape, or rather suggests a form, beyond the fear. Why is suffering a thought but not restless, looks and silent.

Often in the past, I wondered if when John Paul II spoke of the growing spread of a culture of death, I was wrong in assessing the impact of family crisis, the blatant disregard for human life, human dignity and its freedom, violations of justice and the common good. If this was true, if structurally change the family, social relationships and friendships, sexual relationships, our biological nature, the boundaries of life and death were really what we thought they were, the world would have come to in a moment . An eminent colleague, known Catholic intellectual, argued unknowingly have my doubts: "Can not you fools these slogans, the reality is much more complex! The Church, as usual, pulls water to his mill, with its simplistic visions "(yes, we are often some of those who receive funding from the CEI or field of the collections in the parishes). My dear, how wrong we were. The impact is all right and we intellectuals, the isolation of our departments, we are blinded by our own theories. And paradoxically, these departments I see in the images that pass in front: they are attacked and defended, as the monasteries of the past. It occurs to me mind that an important philosopher, not far from Virginia Tech , has recently published two volumes agile "On Bullshit" and "On Truth": oh, yes this is high culture, translated and sold around the world! These are high words that must be defended.

(Scipione) thought that it was the prosperous state in which the walls remain, the costumes collapse. However, it is a gift from God that you are still alive (Augustine).

been a few hours. I continue to work on the computer. I pass by the titles of BBC TV programs they watch on my computer: broadcasts from Bush House, London, were stopped to pray on these human tragedies. London. Coincidentally, that the American president, at his home, pray God with him, people in the streets, universities, sports stadiums. People are tired, people Please, people have turned off the TV. The words have become useless prayers. The end credits of the BBC give way to characters of the story, children were unaware that just hours before they would die in this way. My astral connection with history at this point stops.

I returned in my position as a philosopher, I can not help but note that this story has a few prejudices crumbled in my mind: John Paul II has not lost a game against nihilism, which lives parasitically justice human. The banality of good, mistaken for simple-mindedness, is able to restore a sense of proportion. It is as if the world had turned upside down, as if there had been a Copernican revolution in my mind. That is condensed into a single message, simple and realistic, and I believe that my host was able to quietly explained to his friend from the brilliant logic, the word fast and deep fear. The left something or someone to start over. Good Grief!

"Man is but a reed, the weakest of nature, but it is a thinking reed. You do not need armed themselves throughout the universe to crush him: a vapor, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But even if the universe were to crush him, man would still be nobler than he who kills him, because he knows dying and the superiority of the universe about him, but the universe knows nothing. All our dignity consists then in thought. E 'with melamine and why we must not have the space and time that we could fill. Studiamoci then to think well: this is the principle of moral
(Pascal)

Good Night and Good Luck

Marco

The above image is the picture of Norman Rockwell, Freedom from Fear,
the flag is at half mast in the Main Quadrangle of the University of Notre Dame

the day of the massacre at Virginia Tech .