Amidst the chaos and confusion in Blacksburg the past few days,the 24-hour news networks seemed obsessed with assigning blame, not to the shooter, but to Virginia Tech's administration. Most interviews of those people close to the shooting concluded with the interviewer asking the witness some version of this question: Were you satisfied with the administration's response to the shooting? Seizing upon students' overwhelming anger and sadness, the networks began a campaign of sensationalism that is neither constructive nor entirely unexpected. Still, for commentators to begin whispering accusations of negligence before families learn the fate of their loved ones only contributes to the chaos.
The standard practice following any disaster is for news networks -- starved for new, interesting angles -- to frenzy hungrily at the first scent of controversy. Such concerns are sometimes misplaced and almost always misapplied. Before officials confirmed the shooter's identity yesterday, the media was questioning why the administration failed to notify students of the first shooting earlier. (The first e-mail came at 9:26 a.m., nearly two hours after the first shooting.) Television reporters interviewed exasperated students, many of whom just watched a man without expression or remorse execute their classmates, asking questions crafted specifically to elicit their most visceral feelings of outrage and misery.
Watching the coverage from afar it became clear that these students weren't as angry at administrators as they were just unable to come to grips with what had happened -- frustrated by their powerlessness to save slain friends and colleagues. It became clear, too, that by taking his own life, and having not yet been identified, the murderer effectively acquitted himself of blame.
The decision, or perhaps the reflex, to blame administrators shows what happens when great emotional pain needs an outlet, a target at which to vent overwhelming uncertainty. Since the only people answering questions, the only people with any authority were officials and administrators, they shouldered that burden. Whether or not a faster response by administrators to the first shooting may have prevented the second, deadlier shooting remains uncertain, but the important question is the usefulness of having that conversation now. Without doubt, it is a conversation worth having, but not before burying the dead.
Postponing the distribution of blame is not the same as forgoing it for the sake of feigned solidarity. Silence is not the same as patience. In time, when wounds heal, we may assign blame where blame belongs, but to do so before that healing takes place risks further traumatizing a community that bears so much pain already. Critics are right to worry that grief and sadness might eclipse the need to hold administrators accountable. And they are right to fear the tendency of some to deploy guilt as a weapon to silence dissent. But the best and most helpful critic is the one whose criticism reveals not only ways we have failed, but ways to prevail in the future.
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