Editorial:
TCNJ disappearance affects everyone

The Rider community has seen too many cycles of the grieving process, having been forced to cope with the devastating losses of four students and a professor over the course of one semester. While such things equate to tragedies of an insurmountable degree, there is some good to be gained from even the most heart-wrenching anguish.

We learn that, while the pain never goes away entirely, it does abate with time. We learn that our friendships solidify as we alternately comfort and are comforted by others who share in our grief. And, above all, we learn how to empathize with those who struggle with their own losses, regardless of the circumstances. It’s a hard lesson we all must learn, but it ultimately helps us become better human beings who are more adept at understanding the sorrows of others.

John Fiocco, Jr., a freshman at The College of New Jersey, (TCNJ) has gone missing and, while it is important not to lose hope, it is equally as important to offer our support in whatever ways we can. Since TCNJ is just a quick drive down 95 South, a vast number of Rider students have some sort of bond tying them to this neighboring campus. Regardless of whether or not we can claim to be impacted by such an unsettling event, we all ought to be personally affected on a basic human level.

It should be a knee-jerk reaction for us to be deeply concerned and to wish that Fiocco returns safely to his family, his friends and his college. Admittedly, it is difficult to make ourselves acutely aware of something that may not have an immediate hold on our individual lives, but we all have either a past experience or deep-rooted fear of losing either a peer or a sibling that might help us understand what the TCNJ community and Fiocco’s friends and family beyond the college confines are going through right now.

What may be the most difficult aspect of this situation is that there are too many unknown factors at work. One wants to hope for the best but prepare for the worst, and neither impulse makes day-to-day life any easier. Hoping for the best means there’s a chance you’ll be hit too hard by bad news, as well as delaying both the sense of closure and the natural process of grief and acceptance; however, steeling yourself for the worst suggests defeat and, should there be good news at the end, it makes for a lot of unnecessary emotional anguish. No one deserves to subject themselves to a needless amount of sadness.

There is little we can do to ensure that a missing persons report resolves itself with a happy ending since we don’t live in a perfect world. What we can do, however, is focus on extending any needed assistance and comfort to those not only who are most affected by Fiocco’s disappearance but also the TCNJ community at large. It’s enough that these students have to deal with a loss of sorts; it’s worse that they see reports of their missing classmate plastered on national news and have the dark side of the media crawling around their campus. Now is not the time to brush off a student’s disappearance; now is the time to strengthen our ties with TCNJ. Because while other colleges may be our rivals when it comes to athletics and academics, they are anything but when it comes to matters of human tragedy.