This past week, our school, among so many others across the country, has made a tremendous effort to show support for Virginia Tech in the wake of a tragedy that touches all of us.

On Friday, April 20, the University observed a moment of silence at noon followed by the chiming of the bells 32 times, in honor of each of the victims. When I read about that, I paused ‘ in my mind, there were 33 victims. The exclusion of the killer himself from consideration as a casualty is perhaps one of the most striking and upsetting outcomes of this tragedy.

In no way do I condone or claim to justify his actions, and truly, I find them unforgivable. At the same time, the message of campus solidarity and understanding is grossly undermined by the exclusion of his death as a tragedy on that infamous day.

Clearly, he was not entirely mentally stable, whether it was formally recognized or not. I refuse to believe that there is any facet of human nature that would inherently lead to such an act. Why, then, is it OK to exclude his death from the tragedy? Does his family not suffer as well, if not more, from this event? He might be responsible for the other deaths, but I think in some ways, the greater tragedy is that he ever perceived the necessity for such an action.

Perhaps the most important thing we can learn from this horror is the importance of understanding and the need to exercise our principles as much as our mouths. No matter what we say about unity and solidarity on campus, we haven’t learned our lesson. We don’t respect one another any more now than we did before, we don’t try to help people with problems and we really haven’t changed at all. Wearing orange and maroon doesn’t make the world a better place, no matter what comfort it gives the rest of us. In 10 years, or maybe even less, something like this will happen again. It will keep happening until we do as we say, and not merely as we do.

What bothers me the most about the University’s actions is that the message of compassion and understanding is rendered into meaningless rhetoric. Although I see the reasons that others may have felt him unworthy of inclusion, in the end, we cannot afford to exclude and ignore. He, too, was a victim. We would do well to remember that.

‘ Molly Ariotti is a sophomore is political science and geography major.