It seems like yesterday when that old Zenith black-and-white television was our only window to the outside world and my twin sister and I were the ones peering through it.
In 1966, blackberries grew on bushes, phones were wired to the walls and most decidedly did not take pictures or video. The newspapers came wide and twice a day — morning and afternoon.
The news on television was available only three times a day unless there was the dreaded “special report.”
All television broadcasts ceased at midnight or earlier. The National Anthem was audible at sign-on and sign off each day.
So on August 1, 1966, the news from Austin, Texas that University of Texas engineering student Charles Whitman had climbed to the top of the UT Tower armed with three rifles, two pistols and a sawed-off shotgun shocked a nation that knew nothing of school shootings.
Over a period of 96 minutes, Whitman — described later in The Austin American newspaper as “a good son, a top Boy Scout, an excellent marine, an honor student, a hard worker, a loving husband, a fine scout master, a handsome man, a wonderful friend to all who knew him — and an excellent sniper” — killed 15 people and wounded 31 others before he was shot to death by Austin police officers Ramiro Martinez and Houston McCoy.
But without today’s 24-hour news cycle, it took time for the nation to appreciate the scope of what had happened in Austin. There were no blogs or news updates coming to cell phones.
The only analysis we got was from Walter Cronkite or Chet Huntley and David Brinkley and there was little of that. News, in that era, was delivered in Joe Friday style — just the facts.
Somehow, the nation absorbed the news about Whitman’s act of insanity that long, hot day in Texas without Nancy Grace or Sean Hannity to explain to us what we had seen and heard on the TV or read in the newspapers.
The Virginia Tech tragedy is as real and painful for the people of that community as Luke Woodham’s 1997 rampage in Pearl that killed three and left seven wounded was for us. But the thread of cold, random acts of violent rage and insanity that connects Whitman to Woodham and now to the current lunatic — identified as Virginia Tech English major Cho Seung-Hui, 25 — is as difficult for me to fathom as a middle-aged father of a college student as it was when I was a child sitting on the floor watching my parents’ black-and-white TV.
The story’s the same. Another lone gunman on some private journey to the core of his own madness decides to take some strangers along for the ride. Film at 11 p.m.
At the end of these episodes, there is the inevitable second-guessing, the annoying what ifs and the predictable knee-jerk solutions. But the truth is that no amount of security, no amount of gun control, no amount of procedural preparation and revision will ever absolutely protect people from random acts of violence either in public or private settings.
Why did Whitman, Woodard, or the VT shooter snap? What drove them to have so little value for their own lives or the lives of strangers?
One thing’s sure. We won’t learn the answer to that question from Nancy Grace or from this newspaper or from a blog or Web site in which we “post our feelings” about what happened.
Interviewing Death Row inmates, I learned one hard lesson. People are capable of unspeakable acts of senseless violence. Rarely if ever are those acts justified on any level by identifiable provocations.
Is the world really a more dangerous, frightening place than it was 41 years ago? Probably not. But modern technology has given us a 24-hour news cycle to fill and this story will do until the next wannabe starlet overdoses or the next pop singer shaves her head.
Contact Perspective Editor Sid Salter at 601-961-7084 or e-mail ssalter@clarionledger.com.
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File photo
Forty-one years later, another lone gunman terrorizes a university
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