Last Thursday the foyer of Reid was cloaked in canvas, covered with small messages like “Our thoughts are with you,” and “We’re here for you.” The canvas was a sympathy card for Virginia Tech after the April 16 shootings. A group of students organized and sent off a banner for the victims.
“It’s a more substantial condolence card,” Natalie Knott: a senior politics major who helped with the banner: said. “We were inviting anyone in the Walla Walla community or at Whitman to sign.”
Initial responses to the incident at Va. Tech vary, but for the students responsible for the banner, it was an expression of their grief.
“Shocked and stunned are still my primary emotions. For some reason, I’m not so much angry as I am horrified and heartbroken for the victims and their families. I cannot even imagine what they are going through.” wrote senior psychology-music major Shanna Cole in an e-mail.
“My initial response was not thought out. It was just like, this has happened, and I can’t imagine going on about my day, about my week, without acknowledging it,” Knott said.
Knott also considers the banner an outlet for the entire community.
“What’s interesting about an academic community is that you spend so much time analyzing, and trying to be dispassionate and trying to disconnect so you can examine things fully and from all angles. I don’t think that should be the only way we relate to things. We’re emotional beings, and there should be outlets for that,” Knott said.
Both Knott and Cole helped with a vigil last week mourning the tragedy, and the banner is another illustration of their sympathy for Va. Tech.
“With the artistic help of Gayle Chung, we put the banner together. We asked that it be a banner free from political statements, and just be simply for showing our support and condolences… They just need love,” Cole wrote in an e-mail.
Knott was also part of a student listserv discussion about gun control laws that ensued in the days after the incident.
“When I wrote the original e-mail… it’s because I think you can both mourn and mourn with purpose. And if we keep allowing this kind if violence to continue, well then we’re complicit in that violence,” she said. “The gun control laws, and the way we approach violence as a society, make incidents like Virginia Tech a ticking time bomb.”
Cole shared Knott’s opinion about gun control, though she did not initially think of gun control when the tragedy occurred.
“I needed simply to mourn before I understood why everything happened and how it could have been prevented… Personally, I am in favor of heavy handgun control. Handguns have no purpose but to kill people,” Cole wrote in an e-mail.
Knott, however, did receive some negative responses for her input on the student listserv about the Second Amendment.
“It was really frustrating because everyone called me an ‘anti-gun fanatic’ without actually reading what I was saying… I responded to one man that, I’m not anti-gun… and if you read my words carefully you would see that,” she said. “I guess I’d like to see people be able to recognize that action is not inappropriate.”
The banner was shipped off Tuesday and has probably since arrived at the Virginia Tech campus, though Cole, who sent it, has not yet heard any confirmation.
Knott says that she and some members of the faculty have contacted peers on the Virginia Tech campus to give further support.
“If it were my friends, if it were my professors, if it were my Maxey, my Olin, it would help to know that people didn’t just go on about their days,” said Knott.