The Orbis

Issue date: 9/11/07 Section: Opinion

Media Credit: Madeleine Fentress

Last April, like many students at Vanderbilt, I watched the news almost without pause for an entire day as the horrific details and magnitude of the Virginia Tech murders were revealed. I was reminded of this day two weeks ago, when Virginia Tech's first football game kicked off with a very emotional and very public memorial of the massacre. I remember the day last April like I remember a handful of other incidents that have occurred in my lifetime, each of them disasters that never affected me or my loved ones in a direct way, but that I watched unfold on national television, hundreds or thousands of miles away in the safety of my own home.

Sept. 11 is the pinnacle day of this type for most of our generation. Still, six years later, I often hear groups of people exchanging their own impressions and experiences of that day, where they were when they heard the first tower had been hit, which classroom they sat in to watch the non-stop coverage of the attacks. Everyone has a Sept. 11 story, a story which generally consists, not of news that a family member had been killed, but of the awe and sadness with which they witnessed the day's events.

My pre-Sept. 11 experiences of tragedy as a series of sound bytes and video snippets on television news include the massacre of twelve students at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999, and the oldest of these memories for me, the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building in 1995. I watched the bloody aftermath of the bombing during recess in my third-grade classroom, unbeknownst to my teacher who sat at her desk, too enthralled with the television to notice five or six kids standing in the doorway, watching the horror with wide eyes. I was only eight years old and I was at a cozy elementary school in Payson, Utah, and yet I just managed to tell you my story, my memory of the day 168 people were murdered in a state in which I've never set foot.

The numbers of lives lost and the duration and long-term effects of these tragedies varies greatly. What they share in common in my life, however, is that they are all disasters which never even came close to touching me in any life-changing way, but which I personally relate to in relatively trivial ways. This isn't to say that I didn't have real feelings on these days. Part of what makes them so memorable is not just the terrifying images that still lurk in my imagination, but the genuine sadness that loomed over me sometimes for days or weeks afterward. Compared to what the victims of these tragedies felt, however, my own sadness is inconsequential.

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