Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, December 11, 1994 TAG: 9412120012
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: ELIZABETH OBENSHAIN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
In quiet Southwest Virginia, two officers have been shot down in the line of duty this year.
For violent death to strike during the holiday season makes the tragedy and the unreality of what happened even more stark.
We expect such mindless violence in other places - in bigger cities, in angrier neighborhoods - but not in our back yard.
Suddenly, the violence has come too close. We can imagine the slain officer as one of us, even if we did not know Wythe Deputy Cliff Dicker or Christiansburg officer Terry Griffith. More frightening yet, we can also imagine the victim could have been us - a reminder we are not as immortal as we pretend.
Many of us would like to think that our communities here in the New River Valley and Southwest Virginia will be secure from the ills we read about in other parts of the country.
But the deaths of Deputy Dicker in Wythe County on Tuesday and of Griffith in Christiansburg this fall were perhaps not as irrational as they first seemed, but a more troubling and predictable spread of urban ills into our more rural communities.
Fragmented families, domestic violence, the easy availability of guns and the frightening consequences when that gun is in the wrong hands have fueled the violence in our society - especially among children and teens.
In the 12 years from 1980 to 1992, the number of murders committed here in Virginia by juveniles tripled. ``... kids 12 or 13 years old can kill you as well as someone 35 or 40 if they get a gun,'' said Wythe County Commonwealth's Attorney Tommy Baird.
Fourteen-year-olds, those pimply faced kids barely in the eighth grade, can now be tried as adults.
No easy answers exist. But we must accept that the violence in our country is a problem we must tackle in each of our communities. We know now that none of our neighborhoods is immune.
On a more personal level, the tragedy and the pain of such a death are hard to comprehend or rationalize. We come to expect happiness and a long life as a matter of right in this country. But for the families of these officers, life has dealt an unequal portion of suffering.
Dicker's was not the only tragic death in our area in the past week.
Another community, Radford, and another family are also trying to come to terms with loss after the Rev. George Ducker died in a car wreck last Sunday. Here was a man known as a "great friend," a community leader, a person who "knew what was right" and did it.
How to understand such deaths?
The only consolation I can find is that these deaths teach the rest of us a lesson about the fragility of our own lives and the lives of those around us.
I remember as a teen-ager a simple scene from "Our Town" that captured this lesson.
"It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another," daughter Emily says when she returns for a moment to a busy morning of her childhood. ``... Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?''
As we try to come to terms with such loss around us, perhaps some meaning can come from these deaths if they make the rest of us stop for a moment to realize our own life - and the unique, colorful, irritating, hilarious and irreplaceable lives of those we love around us.
Keywords:
FATALITY
by CNB