The tragedy at Virginia Tech this week is awful. Intellectually, it registers. But for some reason, unlike some other incidents, it’s not registering for me emotionally in any strong way. That bothers me. Have I lost my humanity?

Examining the situation I now have a working hypothesis as to why: there is so much suffering, pain, and violence pushed at us constantly that the threshold for emotional recognition is rising as a survival mechanism. For instance, how many days in the last six months has there been a story about a bomb, plane crash, earthquake, tornado, shooting, etc where the result has been lots of dead bodies? Heck, the news from Iraq alone is enough to make one numb.

I wonder if distance plays into the equation as well, local events do seem to filter through in one way or another. Is this the price of constant connection and instant global information? We’ll see. In the meantime, my mind and thoughts are with the families of the victims of Virginia Tech – I remain hopeful that my feelings will follow.