When I heard that at least 22 people were killed at Virginia Tech today, everything else faded away. Seeing the headlines, I felt one thing: that wrenching flash of dumb comprehension when your throat swells and your eyes lose focus, when you understand what happened and still can’t believe it.
I don’t know anyone there. I’ve never really thought about Virginia Tech. The news still made me want to scream and punch and bury my head.
As journalists, we try to make sense of the world. As people, we try to make sense of our lives. We need to. It’s insanity otherwise. So we work hard to find meaning. We talk and write and share to come grips to what happens to us, big or small.
On days like this, every routine breaks down. My first thought was, Oh my god. My second: Should NBN cover this, and how? And my third: How could I even think about that?
Everyone’s going through the motions, but I wonder how close to any meaning anyone can get right now. I wonder if there’s any meaning, any coherent story, that can emerge except when we’re far enough away to get our usual worldview back in place.
Until then, it’s ordained that wherever you turn on the the Web you’ll find people struggling to make sense of what happened:
- Wikipedia already has its entry. It was created at 10:15 a.m. CT, just three hours after police received the first 911 call.
- The Roanoke Times in Virginia is rapidly updating a blog as their top story. It seems to acknowledge that there is no big picture here, at least not yet: only an endless barrage of details and fragments and moments.
- On Flickr, people are already uploading images — I found this one, of a butterfly, special. One image of CNN’s web site blaring “VIRGINIA TECH RAMPAGE ” is titled “This was my home.”
- People are writing about it in their MySpaces and LiveJournals and blogs, of course, impressing their speechlessness, turning to prayer and maybe reflecting a bit too. At least one conservative blogger has already suggested gun-control laws were to blame, which The NY Times predicts will become a significant “subplot.”
- Virginia Tech has an overly formal message on their site; a “university advisory” that “shootings close campus; gunman deceased.” It’s exactly what you’d expect a university administration to put out. But even that bureaucratically approved language, with its attempt to capture the feelings of and reach out to an entire community within a few paragraphs, makes the rest of the site soulless by comparison.
I could go on to earnestly discuss the trends the new media bloggers will surely pick up in the coming days: CNN’s stunning citizen video, how insanely rapidly blogs can spread and aggregate a story, and how the national media still has a role in bringing us all together. But, for today at least, I think the silence of the dead says more than we could hope to say ourselves.