Friday, April 20, 2007

No one deserves a tragedy

This week in Sojourners, Jim Wallis talked about the Virginia Tech shootings in his "Hearts & Minds" column. The headline, "No one deserves a tragedy," is a line from Va Tech professor and poet Nikki Giovanni and her speech at the memorial convocation on Tuesday. She said:

We are sad today, and we will be sad for quite a while. We are not moving on, we are embracing our mourning. ... We do not understand this tragedy. We know we did nothing to deserve it, but neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS, neither do the invisible children walking the night away to avoid being captured by the rogue army, neither does the baby elephant watching his community being devastated for ivory, neither does the Mexican child looking for fresh water, neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of the night in his crib in the home his father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because the land was destabilized. No one deserves a tragedy.

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