What the HELL is going on in DeKalb?
Tuesday, February 19th, 2008The first funerals took place yesterday, with more scheduled for today and tomorrow, and a campus-wide memorial service scheduled for Sunday in the Convocation Center- the very place I crossed the stage to receive my master’s degree four years ago.
Yes, I’m an alumni. Still, I’ve been uncertain about whether to write anything. Maybe I’m no better than anyone else offering their two cents, their impressions, their perpective. I certainly wasn’t there and will never know this loss first hand.
But I know DeKalb. I know how people refer to it as “practically a Chicago suburb” even though it’s marooned amidst 45 minutes of corn and soybean fields. I know it as a quiet forgotten college town where the students pack their backpacks and laundry baskets each Thursday and Friday and go home to the suburbs of their childhood. And I know it as a town without a shopping mall, where controversial movies never make it to the screen, and where even chain restaurants are few and far between.
For two years, I lived in an apartment off campus, took seminars in DuSable, fought for parking in the yellow lot by the Rec Center, and taught rhetoric and composition. The students I introduced to intertextual analysis and critical reading are now graduating. And grieving.
And the Westboro Baptist Church is there picketing the funerals. It was this- this insensitive, disgusting, uneducated, and hateful action- that compeled me to finally write. Under the apparent belief that this and other tragedies of this country are caused by God as punishment for our acceptance of homosexuality, their presence at NIU is no different.
I’m dismayed- no, I’m angry…red, hot, pent-up angry that the memories of those five students: Ryanne, Julianna, Catalina, Gayle, and Dan, and the survival of 18 others who were shot less than a week ago- are being treated as a political and religious statement by fanatics.
What happened on Thursday was a senseless, premeditated tragedy. What is happening now at the Holmes Student Center is beyond my ability to articulate. It’s simply heartbreaking.
It’s funny because I posted about my dismay over the Westboro idiots when they were picketing the funerals of the Tinley Park victims.
I’ve blogged a couple times about DeKalb as I also received a Master’s Degree there, just a few years before you. But I won’t blog about Westboro being there. I’m still in such shock over it all and I’m angry enough as it is. If I post about Westboro out there in DeKalb, it would just make me even angrier.