Thoughts on the OSU Attack: Where Do We Go from Here?

My future posts probably won’t be this heavy, but some stuff went down on campus that I feel the need to unpack.

Yesterday morning around 10am, I woke up to two of my suitemates barging into my room and telling me and my roommate to look out the window. We opened the curtain to see this:

I got a text from OSU security that warned of an active shooter on campus and to “Run. Hide. Fight.” I didn’t know what was happening, but I tried to remain calm. I don’t have class on Mondays, otherwise I would’ve been around the attack at that time. Luckily I was safe, high on the fifth floor of my dorm building. Our next concern, though, was our other roommates–some of them were holed up in classrooms without much news of what was going on. They seemed to be shaken, but fortunately safe. There’s not much they could do, so one professor taught his students oragami to ease their nerves.  

All we did for the next thirty minutes was stare out the window as more police cars and ambulances barricaded College Road. I hadn’t realized this was national news until a friend in Nashville texted me, asking if I was okay. That surprised me, because it’s not totally uncommon to get notifications of violent incidents or assaults on campus. Last year there was a bomb threat and I holed up in my dorm room the entire day. When dozens of texts from family and friends started flooding in, I realized this was different.

When we heard that there was potentially a second shooter, we locked the deadbolt and turned on the news. Family and friends kept asking for updates, but I didn’t know much else besides the claims that the news was making: Cars running people over, stabbings, shootings, a professor being slashed with a machete, several already dead…the speculations poured in and I was overwhelmed by the the dichotomy of the news and my own experience. I sat in my living room for a couple hours, still in my pjs, flipping between local and national news stations. My mom volunteered to come get me, but the violence was happening across the street and it was safer to stay put. The lockdown was lifted around noon, but we still didn’t know enough information to feel safe enough to leave the rest of the night.

This morning (the next day), news cameras were still stationed outside Watts Hall, where the attack happened. Maybe I’m making this up, but campus seemed emptier. The regular Tuesday morning rush didn’t feel 60,000 strong. Counseling services were set up all over campus, and in my classes, professors held extra office hours to process yesterday’s events. This university response was similar to the support they provided after the election: One of safety, equality, and refuge. Especially in my Arabic class, though I’m surrounded by what I see as a beautiful language, culture, and people that I’m proud to be a small part of, I’m now more afraid for my Muslim friends’ safety than my own.

A kind of scary thing happened today, actually: My Global Politics class is in a building connected to Watts Hall, and my professor was in the middle of discussing terrorism when the fire alarm went off. This also happened yesterday before the incident–once everyone was outside, the attacker ran his car into the crowd. Everyone just kind of sat there, unsure of what to do. My TA started to close the door to barricade ourselves when we decided it’d be better to get the hell out of there just in case there was an actual fire. I went outside, and everyone was anxiously milling around. A Muslim hijabi woman was crying (everyone had heightened emotions, but I can’t imagine what she was feeling), and a few people around just hugged her because that’s all they could do. The fire alarm ended up being an accident, but it made me more anxious than I was in my detached environment yesterday.

It’s difficult for me to articulate how I’m processing this experience. It was strange that I could see the events out my window, but I still felt so removed since I was looking down on it and getting details from the news. Of course I’m happy that no lives were lost, but I still feel guilty by my numbness: shouldn’t I be more shaken?

I can probably justify this by my temperament: I internalize information that doesn’t always reflect the same way on the outside. Also, Ohio State is a MASSIVE school. It feels more like this attack happened to my city rather than my small bubble of a community. However, I was disappointed when the news confirmed that the lone attacker (with a butcher knife, not a gun, as I’ve been constantly reminded) was a Somali refugee. I began to prepare myself for the negative Twitter comments and Facebook posts that would shout, “See, I told you so!” about immigrants, Muslims, and gun laws. I try not to read them, but I am tired of keeping silent over the hate speech I read every day.

I would never try to justify the violence that the attacker inflicted on Ohio State, but an article unearthed by OSU’s publication The Lantern has provided me with a lot of questions about identity, security, and what could push this attacker to do what he did. In the article, which was a “Humans of Ohio State” piece (modeled after Brandon Stanton’s photo blog Humans of New York), Abdul Razak Ali Artan was interviewed in August about his experience as an Ohio State student. As a Muslim, he discussed his hesitation to pray in public when so many people were uncomfortable by it. That is a very legitimate fear that I have fortunately never had to experience myself, and I recognize that. The article humanized him, but it’s still difficult to grasp how someone intent on proving the “media” wrong only validated them. I don’t know what happened in his mind between the interview and his actions yesterday, but I’m frustrated and upset that my university didn’t feel like an inclusive, safe environment for him.

It seems to me like the media has somewhat moved on from yesterday’s events, but the repercussions are still very real to us. I’m grateful for all the love and concern I received about my safety and wellbeing. On the risk of sounding naive, I hope we can extend that compassion to the people around us who are different.