Despite the craziness of the rain and flooding here, I am transfixed by the events on the Virginia Tech campus on Monday.

Where were you when it all began? Like many Granite Staters, I was dealing with the rain, mopping up bits of plaster and water from a leak in my kitchen ceiling. Idle enough. Virginia is so far away from our rain-soaked streets, but I already feel ripples from the tragedy.

Dan Gillmor wrote a fascinating op-ed on how technology has changed tragedy for us. It ran in the Washington Examiner. Here's a snippet:

We used to say that journalists write the first draft of history. Not so, not any longer. The people on the ground at these events write the first draft.

You can read the piece in its entirety here.

The first draft, it seems, has already undergone revisions in this amazingly thorough Wikipedia entry.

From the distance of New Hampshire, it is easy to separate myself from the tragedy and concentrate on the questions: We grieve the dead at Virginia Tech, but more have died in Iraq. What, as a nation, are we doing with that grief? Could a cell-phone alert sent to the students after the first two shootings took place helped prevent further tragedy? Does the saturation of media coverage of tragic events promote copycats? Is it healthy for Americans to see repeated images when they can do nothing? Were there warning signs that friends, family and parents should have noted? Do we need to revisit gun control? Are video games to blame?

Are we just looking for blame?

At this point, I think the only question I could personally begin to answer is the last. It seems like we always do look for blame after tragedy, but I do wonder if sometimes the search for blame is more damaging than the initial event.

The LA Times profiled a professor who blocked the door for his students, dying in the process. It is stories like this that I look to most often after tragedy. I want to find the human side. I want to grieve people, not statistics or political jargon. I want the dead to be more than just a face smiling out at me from a mugshot. I want them to be someone I can mourn, so I have something to do with this sadness and anger and confusion that eats me up when these types of events occur.

We like to make sense out of tragedy. It is one thing to watch a someone gun down a line full of extras on a movie screen, but another entirely when that sort of violence permeates our reality, even from a distance of hundreds of miles. We like to make sense of tragedy, but the truth is, it doesn't often make sense. We can't rewrite a scene and change the course of events at Virginia Tech. And it is that feeling of helplessness that is most disturbing of all. There is no rewind button, no second takes, no do-overs.

Will we learn lessons from this tragedy? As much as I hope so, I worry they will be the wrong ones — of paranoia, of anger and of blame. I worry about the attention paid to some of his earlier writings. I've written some dark and violent stories, but I cannot imagine finding that sort of rage that must have moved him to kill. I worry that "shy" will begin to be mistaken for "anti-social" and "outsider." They are not always so interchangeable. I worry that when we should be banding together as a country, we will use Virginia Tech as an excuse to become more fractured.

My lesson this idle Wednesday afternoon is yet another reminder to stop taking it for granted that the people I love will leave for work each morning and return home without injury or damage at the end of each day. It's a simple lesson — perhaps to the point of oversimplifying, but I am just working through my thoughts here. Whenever I have lost someone unexpectedly, I dwell most on what was left unsaid. The lesson is to stop leaving so much unsaid, I suppose. And I will, for a while, until the memory of Virginia Tech fades to gray in the back of my mind.

What will stay with me longer, I am sure, is the way Virginia Tech has underlined how my industry has changed. It is perhaps the colder lesson, the sanitized one, the one without feeling, the one that distracts from the sad faces and lit candles that came over the wire the last few days, but it is the only one I can muster any semblance of excitement for - whether it was in the blog-style reporting The Roanoke Times used to record the events or the nervous giggles of visiting Swedish students Martin Avebro and Carl Nordin, whose video of students watching the police from a window on campus captured the confusion, the nervous laughter - the reactions before the depth of the tragedy was known. The first draft of history is in different hands and in my mind at least, where it should be.

Enough. Perhaps too much. What are your responses to the shooting? What was your initial reaction? And what is it about April - Waco, Oklahoma City, Columbine and now Virginia Tech - that seems to bring these horrible events?

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