With our pervasive news coverage and the tragedies of our generation, America is becoming familiar with hard times and being brought together as a national community to shoulder them.
When tragedy hits across our country, the media is the first to take a seat at the community vigil and stand alongside neighbors at the homes of those involved so they can tell the story to the American public.
With each new event, we become more weathered and our reaction grows more complicated. The remembrance of tragedy is hard to grasp. But as America steps into the communities of the Virginia Tech shootings and asks to take part in their struggle, we need to work to remember what we can, setting aside our own troubles.
In the first moments of tragedy, the sense of loss is profound, shaking a person or community to a standstill at the confounding and unmoving face of a reality never fully confronted before. The hurt and confusion at a loss like that can't be channeled or talked down.
No excuses or rationalizations, no late-hour news stories that give the "whys" of inevitability or champion the responsive cause will give shape to the turmoil of people hit with it.
The best response is one deep in tragedy's consolatory insight: the incomparable value of people and the reward of being there for someone, at the expense of everything else.
What the communities at Virginia Tech need is a persistent presence of grateful compassion - a presence to turn to when they remember the lost.
As the American community steps in, we need to remember that. We haven't been doing very well at providing that sort of support.
When tragedy hits hard, it's consuming; but when it is described on broadcast news, it can be reduced to unsettling, leaving people to explain it away, and the media to follow suit.
If the event seems predictable and preventable, it loses its sting. With the Virginia Tech shootings, we have turned to profiling. Some listen to the arguments of sterile practicality: he was a troubled student who just never got help.
Easily divided notions of good and evil make others content, sitting still for descriptions of the shooter as an evil kid and another recognizable, opposing force to be reckoned with.
Then we turn to blame. If the event was predictable, whose fault was it, and how do we stop it from happening again? We drag in full display the details of the event. We put the microphone on administrators and police officers.
We sit back and critically examine the testimonies of teachers. We conjure up political and legislative issues as the newsreels roll by and the community really affected is left to their grief, or worse, made to entertain our crusade for distraction.
In time, each of these questions needs to be addressed. But it has been four days. And none of those questions can answer why we lose loved ones. None of them will compare to the real, bitter feeling of the grieving.
America has gone through a stretch of tragedies, and with each hit, the sting runs deeper and the questions get longer. But with each new hardship, we need to set that history and its insecurities aside.
We need to remember again, each time, the raw blow of tragedy. Right now, we need to remember what the people of Virginia Tech are going through, dealing not with a history, but the loss of loved ones.
Whatever our uneasiness with tragedy and its reality, we need to pick up again, to whatever degree we have left it off, the compassion that we should always find when shaken to our core by another's loss.
Matthew Bowman is an English literature senior, and can be reached at
matthew.bowman@asu.edu.
