Tragedy is a word of mouth thing

I step over newspapers wrapped in their dewy plastic sleeves. There are three right in a row on College Street. It's 9 am and everyone hurries by the silent rolls, looking the other way, anywhere but at them. I look down at one and make out the word,Virginia.

When I get to the diner I am surprised to discover that the house copy of the Dispatch is stored in a holder by the door, and not scattered around the counter. No one is reading a paper today. It's just too sad. They are talking though. It goes like this. "It's a shame. So many dead." There is a long reverent pause before the tone changes, "It's a good thing he killed himself." The tone is angry, threatening, and I remember a story I once heard about a reporter who got pinned down in a firefight in Iraq. He didn't worry about dying. He wasn't concerned about pain or being captured. His overwhelming feeling was that of humiliation. For some reason, if you can't run, your body wants to fight - and if you can't fight, your body wants to crawl under a rock and die. Strange and primative.

It is four hours to Virginia Tech from Athens and some of my student here know students there. They certainly feel a kinship and the community as a whole seem to be feeling that humiliation. Maybe we aren't as evolved as we think.