What is happening now, in the aftermath, is a reflex of the human condition. A gunman walks into a place of learning on a campus in Virginia and kills more than 30 people, and the reaction - from media and law enforcement and analysts - is to try and mold the thing into something familiar, something workable, something understandable enough to bring within the dimensions of rational - if inconsolable - grief and sorrow:
Who was the killer? Why would he do such a thing? Why didn't the university sent out a faster warning? What would we do if the same thing happened here? How would colleges in our own region react? What are they doing now to prevent such an event?
That is ultimately human, the response to any event of such madness, natural or spiritual, in which the sheer horror of the moment and the loss of all control - the inability in that window of time to guard our children - leaves a scrambling for familiar levers of cause and reason, the levers that have defined us as human since the dawn of time, when the only answers to things such as this were found or rejected by looking at the sky.
In the end - at the moment when we finally turn off the cell phone, or set down the newspaper, or drag ourselves away from the yellow face of the computer screen, or crawl off the couch at 1 a.m., gray faced and eyes half-closed, to turn off cable voices that offer all while telling nothing - that is what we are left to do today.
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