But somehow I, like many of you, find myself in the hypocritical position of paying way more attention to each detail being revealed about Cho Seung and his victims than I do to the faceless, nameless scores in Baghdad who live and die this type of horror each and every day.

Is it a lack of perspective? A personal bias?

I don't want to think so.

Perhaps, I tell myself, I'm paying more attention to Virginia because more details are readily available about the massacre. Maybe it's the whole "a killer among us" angle. Maybe it's that it was – I hate to say it this way – but as opposed to the daily carnage in Iraq – unexpected.

Even President Bush's speech at VT displayed a certain disconnect, an emotional disparity (not that this is history making for him, mind you), "As you draw closer to your families in the coming days, I ask you to reach out to those who ache for sons and daughters who are never coming home."

He called for the flags to be flown at half staff. And I agree that reverence, solemnity, and honor be displayed towards those who perished on that campus.

But why are the flags not permanently lowered? Surely the lives of the servicemen and women being taken each day overseas warrant such regard? And hundreds of innocents die around the clock in bombings and atrocities which go far beyond the nausea inducing images of a mentally deficient narcissist with two handguns.


You know, after working late, I didn't get to bed till well after midnight last night. Yet as tired as I was, I stared into the dark, as images of the 32 innocent faces faded in and out in my mind's eye. And shadowing them all were the cold eyes of Cho, the same eyes of a shark – lifeless, unfeeling, uncaring, demonic in their emptiness.

And maybe that is where I got some of my answer as to why I am overcome with heartache and suffused with steadily growing anger about Virginia, and filled only with regretful ennui at what transpired in Iraq yesterday.

I can see who did this and I can see the victims. I can hear and read first hand accounts from those at this particular ground zero. I don't get that from the bloody marketplace in Iraq.

Iraq is far, far away – in some ways, it may as well be another planet, light years away from my quiet suburban home. And in its abstractness, in its victims’ anonymity, in its total remove from my day to day existence, I think I find my answer.

It's not a perfect answer, and it's certainly not one that makes me proud. But in some small way, it does explain the disproportion in perspectives:

The degree to which a person cares about a tragedy is in direct proportion to their proximity to it.

I do care that innocent lives are lost on the other side of the world. I do believe that every human life, regardless of how far from me it breathes, is important, is vital, is worth my tears. I really do. I know you do too.

But the lives lost in Virginia on Monday were in my emotional backyard. And to paraphrase an old saying about charity, "Grieving begins at home."

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