Love's In Need Of Love Today

Pardon my lack of intellectual descriptives at the time... but this is some bullshit!

DeKALB, Ill. — With minutes left in a class in ocean sciences at Northern Illinois University on Thursday afternoon, a tall skinny man dressed all in black stepped out from behind a curtain on the stage of the lecture hall, said nothing, and opened fire with a shotgun, the authorities and witnesses said.

The man shot again and again, witnesses said, perhaps 20 times or more. Students in the large lecture hall, stunned and screaming, dropped to the floor. They crouched behind anything they could find, even an overhead projector. They scattered, the blood of victims spattering, some said, on those who escaped injury.

Five people, all of them students, were killed, John G. Peters, the president of Northern Illinois University, said at a news conference late Thursday evening. Sixteen others were wounded, two of them critically, Mr. Peters said. Hospital officials said several of the students had been shot in the head.

The gunman, whom the authorities did not identify, also died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Mr. Peters said. The gunman, he said, had been a graduate student in sociology at the university in 2007, but was no longer enrolled here. Records suggested that the man, who had more recently attended a different state school, had no previous police contact, the authorities said.

Police officers from the campus, which sits in a snow-covered community 65 miles due west of Chicago, said three weapons had been found with the man’s body: two handguns, including a Glock, and the shotgun. The man’s body was found on the lecture hall stage, the police said. He had ammunition left over.

Between the war, the weather, and this school shooting bullshit, we're all checking out by 2010. I'll admit that I'm even more so disturbed by this tragedy because of its proximity to my hometown, and the fact that a childhood friend from the old block was in the building when it all went down. Nonetheless, its ridiculous.

The following not only happens to be one of (if not THE) greatest albums of all time, but it speaks to the issues of today with the same levity it carried 30 years ago.

Stevie Wonder - Songs In The Key Of Life