A Time of Terror
This morning someone went on a shooting rampage at Virginia Tech. The last casualty count I heard was 33 dead, 24 wounded. News analysts are calling the incident the worst college massacre in U.S. history. One of my co-workers has a son at Virginia Tech who, fortunately, was not hurt physically. I am sure he is quite shaken emotionally from the close call, though. It must also be difficult for him because the university has not released the names of those who were shot, so he does not know if any of his friends or teachers were hurt or killed. The closest I can come to imagining what he and other Virginia Tech students are going through is how I felt the morning of September 11, 2001. I knew that many people had been hurt and killed in New York and in Washington, D.C., but I did not know whether any of them were people I knew. Neither cell phones nor land lines were working, so I couldn't call my family and friends to tell them I was ok, or to find out how they were doing. CNN was posting unconfirmed reports about a car bomb at the State Department headquarters, and we wondered if any of our co-workers there were hurt and whether or not it was safe to stay in our annex building. Ultimately we were ordered to leave the building, but we did not know where to go since the main train station in D.C. (Union Station) was shut down and we had heard reports that the subway system (Metro) was shut down as well. When I finally did get home, I just kept watching CNN until I couldn't take it anymore and finally went to sleep.
