Virginia Tech and Bath

Last night in my Bible study group, two members were talking about the Bath school disaster. I had never heard of it. They explained that in 1927, a disgruntled school board member in tiny, rural Bath, Michigan detonated hundreds of pounds of explosives that he had secretly planted under the floors of the elementary school. Forty-five people were killed; another fifty-eight were wounded. Most of the casualties were school children in grades two through six.

There's no way we could have known that Virginia Tech was less than twenty-four hours away from a tragedy of similar proportions. We tend to think that mass murder at school is a recent phenomenon that began at Columbine High. We believe it's the product of a relationship-starved and values-poor society. We fool ourselves into believing that such things could not have happened back in the good old days, when folks lived in small towns with tight social structures, where everybody knew everybody else, and where children were taught values and all adults watched out for all kids.

The Bath tragedy from eighty years ago reminds us that we've always had people among us who have are capable of unspeakable horror: whether it's Eric Harris and Dylan Kleibold , or Timothy McVeigh, or Andrew Kehoe (the Bath bomber), or the yet-to-be-named Virginia Tech murderer. My guess is that they all have one thing in common: a perception that the world had treated them so unjustly and cruelly, that their mass slaughters were justified.

Andrew Kehoe left behind a message burned into a plank of wood in a fence on his farm. It read, "Criminals are made, not born." It's an implied indictment against the grief-stricken community: "You don't like what I did, but you made me this way." I reject that. Most of us have been treated unfairly. Those who have endured severe abuse, though only a small percentage of the populace, still number in the thousands, if not millions. Nearly all of us figure out how to cope and compensate for our hurt. But a tiny, tiny minority lash out with chilling viciousness. It's not a new phenomenon. And we will see it again.

So what do we do? We join in prayer for the families of the victims, we hug our own family a little tighter, and we recognize again that this world is not our home. But we also expect to be moved by another aspect of human nature that surfaces in tragedies like this. We will hear of the heroism of ordinary people who met unthinkable horror with sacrificial courage. And we'll be reminded of the nobility of character instilled in humankind by our gracious Creator.