Darkness falls

I haven’t been able to bring myself to write about the massacre at Virginia Tech, partly because I wondered: What more could I add?

But last week, on the loveseat in Sara’s hippy apartment, I picked up Time magazine and the talented Nancy Gibbs rocked the journalist in me with her amazingly written piece on a saga it didn’t seem possible to add to.

""They were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time," President George W. Bush said plainly of the students who perished, and parents listening jammed their fists into their eyes and shuddered. There is no sweetness in sorrow, no matter how your child dies--on a battlefield, on a mission or on a Monday morning in German class."

(And therein, G.W., lies the tragedy. They were exactly where they should have been: in class, where the most dangerous thing should have been an ignorant professor, perhaps.)

Simple prose; beautifully written.

Before I could look at the coverage somewhat clinically as a member of the media, the news that 30 students in their prime were gone shocked and angered me.

"They had not wandered into one the nation's top universities by accident; they had engineered and calculated and coaxed their way into this school, and they were going places, unitl one day they weren't anymore, stopped by the accumulated debris and derangement of another life, another intent long in the making."

Like everyone else that day, I watched the same footage roll past as breaking news for hours. I listened when I couldn’t watch, the TV at my back in the newsroom. I had questions that wouldn’t be answered for another day.

Why didn’t they immediately lock the campus down? This could’ve been prevented, right?

In the next few days I would watch the now infamous video Cho Seung-Hui sent to NBC. I would quickly close the clip of an Indonesian mother screaming in grief; her raw pain was too much for me to take.

I would wonder with my co-workers about the role the media played in giving Cho what he ultimately sought amid the obvious psychosis: Notoriety. But how much of a role did we play in his decision to become a martyr in his own eyes by killing others?

It is our responsibility to report tragedies like what happened that day, like what happened eight years ago in Columbine, Colo. But by doing so – and by sometimes sensationalizing it – we (inadvertently?) create a Darling of the Media, only in monstrous form. And we spread the mayhem.

“The day after the shooting, bomb scares and other threats closed schools in seven states,” wrote Gibbs.

We made him famous after he did what he did. He wanted his disjointed message shared with the world and we helped him do that. He knew we would.

And now that the over-analyzing – like what I’m doing here – has reached an even keel, we will continue to try to find fresh angles. But will our constant rehashing and presence help the Hokies heal? I doubt it.

Don’t think, though, that the families, students and alumni are the only ones in pain. I have to sympathize with the reporters covering the tragedy, particularly the print reporters. To do the students’ story justice, immersion is inevitable, empathy is a given.

For us, it’s like feeling other people’s pain and channeling it into words to get the story out so that others too can understand what happened. As the messengers we hurt too; we get PTSD and suffer depression. It’s part of the job.

People have asked: Where did we fail him? Which begs the question: How did we fail ourselves? If Cho had forcibly received the help he needed, would those students and professors be alive right now? Would Cho?

As a human being, it is virtually impossible not to mourn with the Hokies and with Cho’s mortified and equally grieving family. As a reporter, it’s hard not to wonder who next we will make a star.

Photo courtesy Virginia Tech's official online memorial