I'm All Out of Thoughts and Prayers
I just don't have the words.
Hey, y’all.
I’d hoped to come to you this week with a story of Plaguesgiving and how the pandemic brought neighbors together.
But then the mass shooting at Michigan State University happened on Monday night — the 67th just this year.
You may not know this, but until last summer, I was an instructor in the university’s journalism school. So I sat and watched, numb, as my former students and colleagues had to experience what none of us should. Three students dead. Five injured.
This is the second mass shooting that has touched my life intimately. My uncle was a sheriff’s deputy and responded to the events at Columbine High School in 1999. I remember watching the events unfold from my newsroom, about an hour and a half south of Littleton, Colo., where it happened. About the same distance I am from the shootings in East Lansing.
I just can’t write about anything right now. I don’t have a well to draw from. The joy of Plaguesgiving seems wrong right now — especially since one of the hosts is an MSU graduate. And I don’t have anything to add about these tragic events. I am all out of thoughts and prayers. We’ve said them enough. Enough!
So instead I’m going to direct you to two pieces that have the right words. I hope you’ll read them.
And I’ll leave you with this: In the days since the tragedy at MSU, three more mass shootings have happened: one in Buffalo, NY; one in Pittsburgh; and one in Sweetwater, Tenn.
The first is from my friend
, who is a faculty member at MSU. She was the one student-journalists were texting while the shooting was active — and afterward. Her words are raw and right.My students share jokes, hot sports takes, and other observations by our text and class DM channels on the regular. They are funny, smart, caring, and increasingly, wary of the outside world. With justification. Last night, they were sharing their fears of dying with me, the way many other students have over the past 25 years: by being slaughtered as innocents by gunman.
I answered as many of my students as I could, until like 2 a.m. I got up this morning with my wrists burning, as I am not a pro-level texter. My mind and heart are empty. I did not sleep last night. Many of my colleagues and friends did not either.
The second piece is from Tim Alberta, a beautiful writer who is on staff at The Atlantic and is also an MSU graduate. He flew into East Lansing and crafted a moving portrait of the campus in mourning and his own feelings.
“You’re at Michigan State. There’s a trust here. You think it’s safe. I mean, look around,” Connor Villeneuve, a junior majoring in human biology, as he swept his hand across the landscape, told me.
Villeneuve had left the library at 7 o’clock Monday night. Walking face-first into a blistering wintry wind, his apartment still some distance away, he had nearly stopped into the Student Union to grab a coffee and warm up. Instead, he hustled home, only to learn of the horror unfolding at the location he’d just brushed past.
“That’s always going to be in the back of my mind,” Villeneuve said. “I think MSU will come back from this. This is a strong school, and we’ll come back stronger than ever. But that trust—” he paused. “I don’t know if that comes back.”
Monday night's event at MSU was horrifying.