International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day

Found out about this idea on Boing Boing, and if I had some professional quality writing to give away I would, but I don't so I am linking back to the source.

33 Dead at Virginia Tech

The recent attack at Virginia Tech has struck me in my core. As someone who works at a University, I have always felt that it would be exceptionally easy to terrorize our nation by targeting a college or university campus. In academia we have open campuses. It's easy for anyone to walk onto most campuses and to do pretty much anything. It's part of our pedagogical culture. We hold this idea that the halls of learning should be available and welcoming. So this recent attack at Virginia Tech was particularly horrifying for me. As a college professor, I am frequently frustrated and annoyed with my students, but they are still my students. I am in a role that forces me to fell protective of them and I cannot help but experience great sorrow at the deaths of the 33 young adults at Virginia Tech. Perhaps this will also signify a loss of innocence in the ivory tower, as we are forced realized that we are not set apart as we once were, that we are not an inviolate and protected castle on a hill. Maybe we will bunker down and move away from our earlier conception of our mission, and begin keep people off our campuses. Or perhaps we will shake our heads and say the right things and move on to business as usual.

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"Kurt is up in Heaven now."

Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday at 84. It's one of those things that happens when an author dies. Having read so much of his work, a girl feels that she knows an author a little bit when she doesn't know him at all. One respects a talent like his and a point of view like his and anyone with pretensions of authorship like mine wonders if she could have a little of what he had. I have always like books that made a person think and written in a style that was clear concise and yet lyrical. A pessimist, a humanist, a realist-- a voice that we have needed In These Times:

From a Rolling Stone Interview: "I've given up on it ... It won't happen. ... The Army kept me on because I could type, so I was typing other people's discharges and stuff. And my feeling was, 'Please, I've done everything I was supposed to do. Can I go home now?' That's what I feel right now. I've written books. Lots of them. Please, I've done everything I'm supposed to do. Can I go home now?"

And from that recent tempest in a tea cup in the Australian: "They [suicide bombers] are dying for their own self-respect. It's a terrible thing to deprive someone of their self-respect. It's [like] your culture is nothing, your race is nothing, you're nothing ... It is sweet and noble - sweet and honourable I guess it is - to die for what you believe in."

Kurt Vonegut, (November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007)