When a Yale graduate student was murdered in September, 2009, I felt an immediate empathy with the students at Yale because I had gone through a murder on a college campus myself 39 years before, May 4, 1970 at Kent State. Actually, it was four murders. And they were perpetrated not by a mad man, but by a mad society, in a way.
I was worried for Yale students because they did not know what they were about to go through, just as those of us at Kent State did not know that many of us would suffer Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a term not yet invented in 1970, but a disorder nonetheless.
I vowed privately to stick with the students (via theantiyale postings on the Yale Daily News board) for the full four years of their journey at Yale, and in a month or so, I will have kept that promise.
Along the way, that Yale class has been further wounded and shocked by suicides and accidental deaths, as well as a tragic death of a beloved classmate by illness.
It almost seemed at times more than a class could endure.
As William Faulkner said in Light in August:
"Too much happens...Man performs, engenders, so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds that he can bear anything...That's what's so terrible."
It is almost 3000 posts later.
I wish the Yale class of 2013 well.
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