When I was a little girl, I saw a cartoon based on Rudyard Kipling’s Rikki-tikki-tavi, the mongoose hero of The Jungle Book who defeated evil cobras. I didn’t like the cartoon, primarily because the villainous snakes terrified me; therefore, I watched it only once. One line, however, has stuck with me for thirty years. One of the cobras hisses to the human child it is threatening, “If you move, I will strike. If you don’t move, I will strike.” Scary, even now.

Maybe it is especially scary now.

For the past six years, our political, military and even religious leaders have been using the threat of another 9/11-like terrorist attack to promote their decisions. If we don’t invade Iraq, we’ll be attacked. If we don’t pass the Patriot Act, we’ll be attacked. If we don’t allow our phone conversations to be monitored, we’ll be attacked. If we leave Iraq, we’ll be attacked. If we don’t ban gay marriage, we’ll be attacked.

Now, Rudy Giuliani, hero of 9/11, has warned us: if we elect a Democrat to the Presidency, we’ll be attacked.

Please forgive me for my profanity, but that is bullshit. (Sometimes the most appropriate word happens to be a profane one.)

Here is what I must say to anyone who gives me the line again: it doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t. Perhaps it sounds like a pessimistic thing to say. I certainly don’t like saying it, but I do believe it. Terrorists don’t care much about big-idea politics; I doubt many of them have any better understanding of the differences between Democrats and Republicans than President Bush has of the differences between Shi’ites and Sunnis. We can pass any law we want, or not pass it. We can monitor phone conversations or not. Leave Iraq or stay. Ban gay marriage or sponsor a cross-country gay pride parade. Doesn’t matter. Not at all.

These terrorists are like the horrifying snakes that gave me nightmares as a little girl. If they get the opportunity, they will strike. Period.

Most people don’t want to face the idea that there are things we cannot predict, cannot control, and cannot prevent. Most people want to cling to the idea that every thing that happens, happens for a reason; therefore, if we just make the right decisions, we can ensure that the right things happen. If you follow that impossible line of thinking, (as Voltaire did superbly in Candide – great book, you should check it out if you haven’t already!) then every baby whose father dies in the Iraq War, deserves to be fatherless. Every child born with cystic fibrosis deserves their pain. Every mother who loses a son or daughter to a drunk driver, deserves their tragedy. They made the wrong decisions.

These are hateful ideas. They necessitate the existence of an angry and unforgiving God who cruelly punishes every tiny transgression. They allow us to wallow in paranoia, fear and fury. They force us to walk on eggshells, second-guess our every move and sift through our own pasts to determine what we have done to deserve our fates.

Sadly, for most people, hate, fear, and anger come easy. The terrorists certainly know that. They feed on it.

Unlike President Bush, Dick Cheney, Rudy Giuliani and the many evangelicals running around screaming about terrorist threats and divine punishments, liberal Christians realize that God’s plan is unknowable. He doesn’t say, “Oh, Joe used my name in vain today; I’m going to give him cancer.” We also accept that true evil is not something we can prevent. It is; it always has been; it will be until the end.

So again, I say, it doesn’t matter. Stay in Iraq or get out. Elect a Democrat or a Republican or even an independent. It does not matter to the terrorists, folks. If we move, they will strike. If we don’t move, they will strike.

Human beings naturally want to make sense out of senseless things.

April 16, 2007 was a senseless day. It was a nightmare that unfolded so slowly, we didn’t realize how horrific it was until it was over. For me, I happened to notice a headline on Yahoo news in the morning: 1 dead and 1 wounded in Virginia Tech shooting. Sad, yes, but I kind of forgot about it as I got my son off to kindergarten and headed off to work. In the afternoon, as I was walking from the library to my classroom, I passed a TV surrounded by students watching CNN. The death toll was up to 21. I called my husband to find out what had happened. “Some crazy guy just started shooting people,” he said. By the time my class was over, 33 people had died.

My students weren’t talking about it much. They are busy getting ready for finals, and many of them hadn’t had time to look at the news all day. Now that the full magnitude of what happened has set in, though, people are subdued.

Since I work on a college campus, I can’t help but wonder: what if it had happened here? Would our police have reacted differently? Would they have closed the campus after the first two shootings in the morning? Would a gunman be able to trap students in a building and pick them off one by one? The truth is, this tragedy could probably have happened at all the universities I’ve known.

The campus where I currently teach is large and urban. If someone had shot a couple people in the dorms a quarter mile from the building where I teach, I doubt if our police would have closed the whole school down. There are a lot of buildings between the dorms and my classroom. Police would probably not have considered it necessary to lock down my building. I probably would not have considered it necessary.

Would a gunman have been able to trap students in my building? Sure. It’s six stories, three stairwells and one elevator. Each classroom has only one door as most classrooms do, and the upper story windows are unable to be opened. It wouldn’t take much to pick us off – just a gun and a lack of conscience.

And I’m sure my school has a loose cannon or two just waiting for their fuses to be lit. Once in a while, I hear scary stories from my colleagues about students who write disturbing papers or even threaten their professors or classmates. I have been lucky enough never to have such a student in my own class. Yet.

So now the investigations and the debates have begun. What set him off? Why did he wait two hours between the first shootings and the later ones? Why did he have the words “Ismail Ax” on his arm? Why didn’t the police lock down the campus? Why don’t we have tougher gun laws? How can we make schools safer? Why is the United States experiencing so many school shootings?

The very sad thing is that most of these questions just cannot be answered. Not in any useful way. We may be able to make some changes; we may be more aware, but it will probably be temporary.

This tragedy was senseless. That may be the hardest thing for us to come to terms with.