> > This just feels weird, talking about this. I want to say something here, but I'm really drained. Maybe I'll be more coherent in a bit.
>
> It's weird -- it's a tragedy that affects me only because I've been in the place where it happened. Somehow that makes me more sympathetic to this event than, say, the Egypt Air crash. With the plane crash, hundreds of people are dead. It doesn't affect me outside of an occasional thought. Callousness? No. I think it's detachment.
>
> With the Bonfire collapse, only four people are known to be dead (possibly more will be found as the day goes on). Yet because these few deaths happened at a place where I lived for years...
>
> Or is it something else? Planes crash, killing people. They've crashed before, they'll crash in the future. The Texas A&M Bonfire has never collapsed. There's only been one death associated with Bonfire, and that several decades ago. Maybe it's the fact that it's never happened before.
>
> Anyway.
>
> I don't know anyone at Texas A&M. When I went to the university, I didn't work on Bonfire. It was a tradition that got out of hand and became something stupid.
>
> Bonfire started off when a group of Aggies gathered together neighborhood trash, tossed it on a heap, and set it aflame. You get a bunch of boys, give them lots of beer and a lighter -- something's going to happen. Anyway, it went from a neighborhood trash cleanup event (which even included the dean of the University of Texas' outhouse one autumn) to something that involves the clearcutting of forested areas, stacking them taller and taller, a boorish rite of passage filled with tales of sexual assault, hazing, and racist yahoos running around the woods with axes.
>
> I hope that next year, Bonfire is rethought. Take it back to it's roots -- a community clean-up project. Just toss that trash on the fire. Who cares if we break the old height record set last year?
>
> Anyway (again). I was going to link to the Bonfire: Dumb as Dirt page (over at http://conserve.tamu.edu) but, understandably, TAMU's servers are being hard-hit today.
>
> -Faux "back to his old bitter self" Pas

Faux Pas,

I'm sorry. 'At least you didn't know any of them' seems to dismiss the real effect the deaths have obviously had on you. It is enough that you hold the place in you memory. It is enough that it is a place within you, after it has ceased to be a physical home for you. Now, learning that a tragedy has happened, of course you feel real pain and disbelief. I think that when something tragic happens at a place we hold dear, just as when it happens to a person we hold dear, we cannot help but be touched by it.

I hope you feel better soon.

Grace