Senseless Acts of Violence And a Time for Change

Time for something completely different and not related to my artistic endeavors.

I was going to write something light-hearted and jovial today, but the day’s news and tragic loss of life at Virginia Tech has dampened my spirits. My heart goes out to the families of those killed and injured. I will never understand how a person could do something so horrid and senseless.

Toll climbs to 33 in Virginia campus shooting

I read a historical list of the attacks on students and staff at schools that have occurred since the 1989 shootings at L'École Polytechnique in Montreal. What can we do as a society to stop these senseless acts of violence? It’s clear we’re not doing enough. Schools, colleges, universities, etc. should be safe places for our children and young men and women not war zones.

Attacks on students and staff

The Montreal Massacre

A day like today calls for collective consciousness, for society as a whole to wake up and start making changes.

"Our personal psychology is just a thin skin, a ripple on the ocean of collective psychology. The powerful factor, the factor that changes our whole life, which changes the surface of our known world, which makes history, is collective psychology, which moves according to laws entirely different from those of our [individual] consciousness." ~ Carl Jung


A Working Definition of Collective Consciousness

I continue to remain eternally optimistic that society, worldwide and not just within my own country, can and will begin to work together and make changes. What changes? This is what we all need to be asking others and ourselves today. Keep the discussion going and change will come.