Getting my humanity back

22. That was the death toll around 12 noon yesterday morning, when a co-worker mentioned the tragedy at Virginia Tech. I, in a knee-jerk reaction, went straight to CNN.com to get the news. And how macabre it was; students, going about their Monday morning, were senselessly gunned down.

But what disgusted me more than the event itself was my immediate reaction: acknowledgment of the event, but no acknowledgment of the emotional weight.

In retrospect, I surmise that after seeing the death tolls of September 11th, reading about the ongoing carnage in Iraq; hell, watching a fictional nuclear bomb detonate near Los Angeles in "24", that the deaths of 22 people just didn't have the deep emotional impact on me.

At that point, the closest I got to "emotional impact" was when I began to think of my friend in Blacksburg, whom I knew was safe since he's a Tech alum (and thus, wouldn't have been in a classroom or dorm). However, I began to think, "what about everyone else? People are dead and I'm happy that my friend--who was never in harm's way in the first place--is ok?"

Why?

My answer (which is not an excuse, mind you, but rather is the closest I've come to an explanation) is that somewhere along the way, I became desensitized to the violence of this world.

And that's when I gave myself a long over-due, but much needed, punch in gut. I had to get my senses back, had to come down to Earth, had to realize that whether it's 33 people in Blacksburg, or three people in a Nor'easter, whether its 7 in Iraq, or ~90,000 in Hiroshima, that each and every human life lost needs to be mourned.




Somewhere along the way, I became desensitized to the violence of this world. Somewhere along the way, deaths just stop meaning as much to me; but this emotional disconnect ends now. I've gotten part of my humanity back.