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4/23/2007

One Week Later

This evening our school held a candle light vigil for the victims of the tragedy at Virginia Tech last week. It was a really moving ceremony w/ students’ poems, a reading of the names of the victims, and a song.

After the vigil I was thinking about previous times I felt this way and I thought back to to a similar moment I had after 9-11. These days when something horrible happens in America I feel it over here but I think it's different b/c we're so far away. Now I’m not going to go on and on about all of these tragedies but I did want to share a similar moment I’ll never forget; a moment that still brings me to tears:

I am the kind of person that has music interlaced w/ almost every one of my lasting memories and I’ll never forget the telethon for the victims of 9-11. On that night Eddie Vedder, Mike McCready, and Neil Young played a very somber version of ‘Long Road,’ a song by Pearl Jam. Many of you know that I’m a huge Pearl Jam fan but this has nothing to do w/ that (other than the possibility that my previous familiarity with the song and it’s meaning probably enhanced the impact of the moment) This is such a beautiful song being played at the perfect moment. It almost seems that this song was written after the attack. This is why music is such an amazing thing to me; this song really brought a measure of comfort to me at such a horrible moment in time.

So in this time of tragedy and pain I thought back to this moment and decided I would share this song that at one point really helped me.

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