President’s Blog Flow of Ideas

Prologue

I drafted a blog entry as I was returning from Chicago to Colorado Springs on the morning of Monday, April 16, before I’d heard the news from Virginia Tech. I was tired as I wrote, so I held onto the draft to take a second look at it before I posted it.

“Yesterday began like any other day” said someone at the Virginia Tech memorial service on Tuesday. “And then it became like no other. Everything changed.”

The senseless, brutal outburst of one student on that campus cut short the lives of thirty-two others, mostly students; some, teachers. And on the CC campus, students stood in the Worner Student Center silently watching the words and images of the CNN live news reports. Some wept. All grieved.

But for the grace of God it might have been our campus.

We could only wonder that the “bubble”—the distance from the worries of the everyday world that is both a gift and a curse for a college campus—proved to be no bubble at all in Blacksburg, Virginia. This sanctuary, where we join in a focused effort at teaching and learning, so unique that we seldom come to appreciate it fully until long after we have left it behind, can be invaded by the sharp, all-too-frequent outbreaks of savage violence that seem to plague our society.

Our faculty, meeting as they do on the final Monday of each block, sat in a moment of silence in shocked solidarity with their suffering colleagues 1,000 miles away. On Tuesday, students and staff members lit candles in Shove Chapel and gathered in remembrance in the late afternoon. And, of course, key administrators met to review what we might do on this campus should we be confronted by some unimagined random act of violence.

I feel a deep sadness as I write these words, sadness that my colleagues and I cannot make this a perfectly safe place for our students. That we can’t protect them from a booze-induced accident; from an adventure that turns into a misadventure. Most of all, that we cannot insulate them from these crushing outbreaks of violence that, although random, seem to have become ever more frequent.

And so my thoughts turn to the blog I wrote before I learned about the shooting at Virginia Tech. I share it with you now.

I remember vividly when I first saw this sign—circumstances I will save for my memoir. It blocked the road that led to a bird sanctuary located in a wetlands west of Cleveland, my home town. Truthfully, it wasn’t the circumstance that made it memorable. It was the juxtaposition of the affirmation: “Sanctuary,” on the one hand, and the admonition “Enter at your own risk” on the other.

Often in my days as a practicing politician I thought of this sign. It seemed to describe the political arena pretty well. In a democracy like ours, the institutions of governance represent a kind of sanctuary — a hallowed ground — affording representation and respect for all of our citizens. Or at least this is true when the process works at its best.

But when you entered into the process – ran for office, for example – you took a risk. You could lose. And whatever you did took place in a highly visible environment. Even if you were successful and won public office you were obliged to govern, and again you worked in an enterprise that constantly invited criticism and contention.

Risk has always played a major role in defining who we Americans are as a people. Our ancestors risked the unknown in crossing the ocean to settle her. My grandmother was only 19 when she took my father as an infant from a dirt poor village in southern Italy to a strange city in a strange land to meet up with a husband she hardly knew. What a risk! And that willingness to take a risk is played out everyday, as an aside, by the illegal immigrants as they try to enter our land.

In fact, I think the propensity to take risks may well be a defining characteristic of our nation as compared to others: to pack up and move our family; to start a new business; to attend a college 1000 miles from home. These acts, so rare in other places, are taken for granted here.

Consequently I am deeply concerned about the impact of 9/11 on our society. National Security has become the watchword. At every turn, in business and in public life, risk reduction has become a preoccupation. We seem willing to sacrifice long held principles—foregoing habeas corpus, accepting torture and domestic eavesdropping—in the quest for security.

The irony is that our open society requires that we live with risk. I was struck by the candor of a Homeland Security official who was quoted on NPR the other day stating bluntly, “We are not going to eliminate risk in the 21^st century.” My college chaplain Bill Coffin was fond of saying that “life is a risk exercise.”

We need to remember and embrace that notion. Our democracy and our open society oblige us to embrace risk. If we allow the fear of terrorists, or immigrants, or aliens to overwhelm our confidence in the sanctuary we share I am afraid that we will undermine the very values that make us strong—and have made us the envy of so many others around the globe.