One year ago today I was teaching at a small liberal arts college in the Shenandoah valley of Virginia. I remember my friend coming in and telling me that there had been a shooting at Virginia Tech just a few hours down the road. I remember going off to class thinking what a sad thing that was, only to return to my office to discover that one shooting had become chaos. Thirty-two people were shot by one gunman who then took his own life. Thirty-three deaths in all, but many more victims than that exist.

In ten years of teaching college-age students I have come to appreciate how complex their world is. I have seen mental illness. I have watched students die. I have had students arrested. I have had the bomb-squad parked outside my classroom door during finals. I have had students afraid for their lives, fearful that someone from their own family will kill them. But I have also watched students blossom and become adults. I have seen students happy and excited about the future. I have watched students dedicate themselves to a lifetime of service of their fellow man.

I have never locked my doors to keep students in or to keep them out. I probably never will. At the back of my mind perhaps I worry about keeping my students safe, but I will not live my life in fear. I will send my son off to college and hope he comes back home. I will help him to live because the risks are worth it.

One year later, we remember:

Ross A. Alameddine | Christopher James Bishop | Brian R. Bluhm | Ryan Christopher Clark | Austin Michelle Cloyd | Jocelyne Couture-Nowak | Daniel Alejandro Perez Cueva | Kevin P. Granata | Matthew Gregory Gwaltney | Caitlin Millar Hammaren | Jeremy Michael Herbstritt | Rachael Elizabeth Hill | Emily Jane Hilscher | Jarrett Lee Lane | Matthew Joseph La Porte | Henry J. Lee | Liviu Librescu | G.V. Loganathan | Partahi Mamora Halomoan Lumbantoruan | Lauren Ashley McCain | Daniel Patrick O’Neil | Juan Ramon Ortiz-Ortiz | Minal Hiralal Panchal | Erin Nicole Peterson | Michael Steven Pohle, Jr. | Julia Kathleen Pryde | Mary Karen Read | Reema Joseph Samaha | Waleed Mohamed Shaalan | Leslie Geraldine Sherman | Maxine Shelly Turner | Nicole Regina White

 We are the Hokie Nation.

Today, like all days, the news wires are filled with bad news on top of bad news. Bombings, killings, accidents, torture memos, walls, disease, poverty. We can’t escape them. Sometimes, though, it is necessary to realize that there is also beauty.

The National Cherry Blossom festival is currently underway in Washington, DC. Not all of us can get there and many won’t be able to see the picture below, but we can all walk outside at some point and find something pretty to look at. We may find flowers, or a weed growing in the sidewalk, or a smile on the face of another human being.

Get out and look. Beauty is what reminds us that the world needs saving.

Picture from: How Stuff Works. Cherry blossoms around the Tidal Basin, Washington, DC.

What does it mean to be human?

As a biologist I can give you a very scientific answer, and at one point in my life that is probably the only answer you would have gotten out of me. Humans are mammals. We are complex eukaryotic organisms. We have the ability to perform higher order thought and communicate in complex ways. Primarily as a biologist I taught infectious disease courses, so I can tell you also how humans get sick and sometimes how they die. By the end of 10 years of college level teaching, however, I had come to realize that there is more to being human than mere biology.

Thoughts shape our world, both figuratively and literally. Our worldviews are verbalizations of our perspective and understanding of what is around us. It is not tangible per se, but our worldview shapes how we exist within the real world. Words, then, become policies and policies have the ability to physically relandscape our worldview.

Living in the United States in a priveledged society, it is all too easy to forget that the words of our mouths go beyond our borders. What we do affects others. What others do affects us. We cannot afford to be insular. This blog (which, by the way, is my second attempt — I pretty much wrote into a wall with the first one that lasted all of a month before I deleted myself off the internet) is an attempt at verbalizing a worldview that includes social justice issues framed from a background of understanding science. I think it is important, and hope some of you out there will too.