Reaction to Tragedy Is a Grimly Practiced Response
BLACKSBURG, Va.–It says something about how Americans now react to violence when early word that two people had been shot dead in a Virginia Tech dormitory Monday was deemed by many "a relief–no big deal," as a local radio host said during drive time here this morning.
Folks felt free to continue their morning routines; classes were held as scheduled at the university.
But when the horror on this sprawling, wind-whipped campus quickly expanded to 33 massacred students and instructors–the worst mass shooting in U.S. history–it was just as telling to watch, in this post-Columbine, post-9/11, post-Amish school killings world, how grimly practiced the response to such tragedies has become.
Dr. Phil opined on Larry King about campus security. Cable talkers debated gun control. And here the now-familiar dance of the media, law enforcement, politicians, and survivors began Monday under a cobalt blue evening sky and in the shadow of unimaginable carnage.
"We are here, nestled into a little corner of the Appalachians," said Sherman Wright, who works at the Blacksburg Baptist Church, just across from campus. "And this has jerked them into the real world."
Monday night, that real world was part media circus, part quiet reflection, and part unalloyed grief. Hundreds of reporters spilled out of a conference room at the Holtzman Alumni Center, converted to a media center, where they grilled police and university officials on their decision not to lock down the campus after the first shootings.
Just several hundred yards away–in the Virginia Tech Inn, a wing of the same complex–grief-stricken students and family members gathered to learn the fate of loved ones. Young women in Tech sweats sobbed and held each other as word came by cellphone and text message confirming one of the dead. Family members, heads bowed, were hustled to a room set aside for them. And a handful of students sat impassively in the bar where chairs had been set up for them to watch television reports detailing the massacre on their campus.
Later, shortly after midnight, students gathered on the campus's Drill Field and talked emotionally about the horrible day just past. There was some anger about the official response to the first shootings–though supporters of President Charles W. Steger emphasized that he "didn't pull the trigger." But there was also talk about what students here had lost, shattered by a rampage they would learn early today was allegedly undertaken by one of their own, Cho Seung-Hui.
"Our campus is relatively quiet most of the year," said senior Jon Hess of Council, Va. "Usually the biggest thing that comes to town is a good football game–that's why I love going to school here.
"I was in town today and a local woman told me she'd never let her children go to Tech," Hess said. "It just breaks your heart."
On Tuesday morning, the streets of usually bustling downtown Blacksburg were deserted. The throngs of students usually filling the sidewalks and grabbing breakfast at Gillies or coffee at Bollo's were either in their dorms or apartments, or had headed home to be with their shaken families.
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