I’m heading to Chicago tomorrow for what promises to be an odd “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me.” Finding funny things in the news in a week like this is… challenging.

Which brings me to the whole Virginia Tech thing. I’ve been trying to figure out a way to say this without seeming too nihilistic. But nothing’s occurred to me, ironically enough. So -

To me, those killings at VT don’t mean anything, aren’t a sign of anything, and there’s really nobody to blame who’s still alive. We’re used to our national tragedies having additional culprits - evil masterminds, fearsome ideologies, or at least bungling leaders. Even Columbine had the people who provided those minors with weapons.

Here, you’ve just got one batshit crazy young man. He was creeping out his fellow students and teachers, yes, but not to the point where you’d be able to lock him up. The police and the campus officials had no reason to believe - after the first murders - that a rampage was in the cards.

And then there’s the gun thing. Some people are saying that stricter gun laws could have prevented this, while others think that it was the campus’ no gun rule that kept a well-armed citizenry from defending itself. I don’t know that I buy either argument (even though I really do favor gun control), given the long-term planning of the deed on the one hand, and on the other the absurdity of thinking that anyone would choose to arm themselves for a trip to their campus science building at 9AM.

And yet those arguments are out there. Along with allegations that this is a symptom of the moral or religious breakdown of our society (somewhat contradicted by the killer’s rambling moralizing), that there was a terrorist connection or even an Islamic terrorist connection, and - of course - that liberals and/or conservatives are really to blame for this.

Nope.

To me this situation demands one thing and one thing only - grief. A tragedy has happened, there was probably no predicting or foreseeing it, but our poor brains, genetically and culturally programmed to be ceaseless cause-and-effect analyzing machines… just can’t handle it. Maybe when we learn more about it, we’ll see the root causes, maybe a key piece of information will be revealed… but my money’s on Not.

There probably are reasons why. Those reasons probably DO have to do with our culture, our laws, the killer’s life and the people around him, and lots of other factors including - who knows - diet, seasonal allergies, weather, and “American Idol.” And my guess is that we’ll never really be able to figure out what exactly we need to change in order to prevent this from happening again. [My guess is that it’s something weird and unknowable, like making General Mills return all those long-abandoned minor characters to the Cap’n Crunch boxes, which would set in motion some arcane and unlikely set of events that created total peace on Earth…] If we try we can figure out how to move economies, fix climates, cure diseases and end wars, but parsing how to stop things from happening inside the heads of random people… that’s a little tougher.

Yep, it’s going to an interesting “Wait Wait.” I’m off to read about whatever goofy stuff happened in the margins…