Edvard Munch, at the time he completed his masterpiece ‘The Scream’, said he had tried to express the scream that echoes throughout creation. And the picture with its lines distorted around a distorted human face, conveys a disturbing and disorientating sense of unspeakable anguish. And the hands that frame the face are covering the ears, perhaps trying to shut out the noise of the scream, but unable to silence the inward scream that is the response to unimaginable pain. Yesterday, in the aftermath of the massacre of young students at Virginia Tech, someone said 2007 can already be called the year of the scream.
A blog isn’t the place for plausible explanations (none come to mind), nor the place to pinpoint blame (the killer, the gun culture, the video-game aneasthetising of violence); I want to scream. I want to protest at the waste, the tragedy, the cruelty of what has happened to so many young lives, and the devastation unleashed out of the blue on so many families and communities. I want to scream at whatever it is that drives one human being to kill so many with automatic efficiency and bypass any of the usual human restraints of conscience, compassion, satiated appetite for violence. And inside, like the rest of us, I’m sick. A University is a place of learning, of developing potential, of human activity focused on self-development towards usefulness as a human being, a place where people come to be changed by learning and knowing.
Lord have mercy
Christ have mercy
Lord have mercy
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