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| A film by director Martin Doblmeier questions people of different faiths about forgiving atrocities. It was screened for students
at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., after the shootings. Gene J. Puskar/AP |
!['I realized there's a lot more to life than blaming [Cho] and being angry. It was a relief.' – Virgina Tech student Larissa Mihalisko](/2007/0921/csmimg/LFORGIVENESS_P4.jpg)
!['I realized there's a lot more to life than blaming [Cho] and being angry. It was a relief.' – Virgina Tech student Larissa Mihalisko](/2007/0921/csmimg/LFORGIVENESS_P4_T.jpg)
At Virginia Tech, a film asks, 'Can we forgive?'
A PBS documentary called 'The Power of Forgiveness' has a healing message for survivors of the school shooting.
from the September 21, 2007 edition
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The movie includes interviews with Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh and bestselling authors Thomas Moore and Marianne Williamson. Some of what they say garnered murmurs of recognition from the audience in Blacksburg.
"Forgiveness allows us to actually let go of the pain in the memory, and if we let go of the pain in the memory, we can have the memory, but it doesn't control us," says Alexandra Asseily in the film. She is the founder of a forgiveness garden in Beirut. "When the memory controls us, we are then puppets of the past."
Here in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the 25,000-student Virginia Tech campus is the backbone of Blacksburg, a small town on a rolling, pristine landscape that is secluded from the bustle of city life. It is the sort of town where everyone knows everyone, everyone knows someone associated with the university, and so therefore everyone knows someone affected by the shootings. And emotions still are raw.
Some students don't want to talk about the shootings, even among their friends, because they are trying to achieve some sense of normalcy. Hours before Sunday's screening, in the morning after the Hokies' thrilling 28-7 home-field football victory over Ohio, parents and alumni soberly lingered at an on-campus memorial for those killed in the shootings, an arc of stones engraved with their names a few yards from Norris Hall, where Cho fired more than 100 shots. The memorial is on the edge of the Drillfield, a grassy expanse at the heart of the campus, where on this sunny morning people played with their children, threw Frisbees, and walked golden retrievers.
Throughout town, signs and even restaurant receipts proclaim, "We are Hokies. We will prevail. We are Virginia Tech."
Even so, perhaps the hardest part of forgiving is letting go of anger without feeling that one is forgetting the incident, dishonoring someone, or allowing a crime to go unchecked. "The Power of Forgiveness" confronts these sorts of complexities and recognizes that the process by which we forgive – and even the definition of the word itself – is different for everyone. It chronicles forgiveness as it unfolds for those victimized by violence in Northern Ireland, for Holocaust survivors, 9/11 widows and widowers, and for a Pennsylvania community where, last year, a gunman opened fire and killed five children in an Amish schoolhouse.
Victoria Wilson found the film moving. A graduate student in English, she had shared a class with Cho. It is an important film for Blacksburg, she says.
"Forgiveness is essential to the healing process," says Ms. Wilson. "A lot of people are struggling with forgiving Cho and forgiving the administration. Everyone wants to put blame on someone, and I don't think that's good for anyone. I think everyone makes mistakes including the administration, and it doesn't make sense to keep being angry."
The community will continue to grapple with such issues. After the shootings, students put together a temporary memorial, and in the days that followed a 33rd stone for Cho appeared and disappeared twice. Eventually a permanent memorial replaced the temporary one. It has 32 stones.
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