The tragedy at Virginia Tech was just, as everyone knows by now, horrible. Although I live hundreds of miles away, I am a remote grad student at VT. The area I live is deeply affected, and there is a sense of shock throughout the community. The county school system published a list of its high school graduates that were killed. Today has been proclaimed as an official statewide day of mourning.
But I have become jaded by the media blitz, and the politicization of the event. It seems that everybody wants to get on record with some sort of statement. Less than 24 hours after the killings, I seem to remember the calls for healing.
Wait a minute. The names of the victims had not been publicly released. The police were still conducting their investigation. No memorial services had yet been held. And I heard the calls for healing.
People are now beginning to fully absorb the enormity of the event. It seems like there is some profound mourning that needs to occur before the healing process can start.
Communications happen much faster now, the speed of news coverage was amazing. But even in 2007 the speed of human emotion is not different than it was thousands of years ago. Why are we so eager to jump from tragedy to “healing” in a matter of hours?