Killings Join With Storms As Signs Of The Times And Signs Of A Coming Maelstrom

It was like a barometer of the times, of the evil. In the 1960s, it was Charles Whitman. He shot 13 on a campus. In the 1990s, it was Columbine. The dead there, again 13.

Now in the first decade of a new and turbulent century -- a new millennium -- the toll is a ghastly 33, with 15 injured, the worst such shooting in American history.

It's like they follow a pattern related to other things. Whitman shot from a tower at the University of Texas in 1966. Richard Speck (who sported a tattoo that said "Born of Raise Hell") killed eight student nurses that same strange year in Chicago. Two students immersed in dark Gothic music killed 12 students in Colorado in 1999. And now there are the more than thirty -- two and a half times Columbine -- on that campus at this moment in history that swirls at greater speed in the formation of a coming maelstrom.

Stuff is coming. There is turmoil just over the horizon. There will be a major upheaval. There is the tracking with storms. If 1966 came during an active hurricane cycle, and 1999 was known for a flurry of storms, including Hurricane Floyd, which at one point posed the biggest such threat in recorded history, the shootings in Virginia arrived in the very midst of a huge "nor'easter."

If nothing else, the shootings tell us much about the storms in our culture. It is a culture immersed in violence. It's a culture immersed in hatred. It's a culture that has devalued life. John Paul himself -- speaking in Denver, not far from Columbine, to youth -- called it a "culture of death."

No one can keep a straight face and say that all those television shows and movies by big-name actors that portray killings are not responsible in some part and perhaps in the main part for the mentality of a crazed person who chooses to go along with what seems like the way to do things histrionically.

All actors who glorify the spray of bullets and the spilling of blood owe 33 sets of parents an apology.

All who favor the killing of the unborn should send flowers.

All who devalue life through cloning, through sexual manipulation, through gender confusion, through genetic experimentation, through euthanasia, through war, and through an obsession with sex should order a bouquet.

This is about lust and anger at a time when our youth are taught to act out lust and anger.

There are not only the movies with unspeakable acts but also advertisements for them for all to see on billboards.

At Columbine, there was a clear connection between the killings and a dark music with occult undertones. They even listened to Marilyn Manson -- a self-professed satanist and "musician." Expect to see some kind of macabre aspect in the background of the current suspect.

And be cautious about what comes next. Another sign of the times is the way the killing at Virginia Tech shocked because of the sheer number and at the same time was something we could integrate readily because we are used to hearing about body counts and explosions and abductions and outrageous serial crimes every day.

The antidote to violence is Christ and without Him more mayhem will follow and events will reach a boiling point.

Strange it is that Virginia Tech is located in Blacksburgh, Virginia -- home of one of America's most notorious serial killers, Henry Lee Lucas.

Ironic it was too that in the year of the Whitman shootings at that other college in Texas an unusual storm hit, traveling all the way from Africa to the U.S. and then up past Canada, to the Arctic.

Unusual indeed, and it was called Hurricane Faith.

4/17/07