Hands will be wrung, platitudes will be uttered, shock and disbelief will be duly noted; thirty-two people dead in one go is quite an achievment.
And while the media focuses all its attention on trying to learn the hows and whys of something that is ultimately unknowable, the American cult of death will continue to operate, the shadows providing such perfect disguise.
Despite issuing mild words of comfort to the families of the victims of the unnamed gunman, Our Beloved President took the time on Monday to make an appearance at the White House surrounded by the families of soldiers killed in Iraq. The implication is clear: If these people can support him, why can't the rest of us?
Of course, those families support him because they want to, or perhaps need to. They need to believe their children, their parents, their brothers or sisters died for a reason, not as part of an act of caprice by an administration so drunk on its own power it will allow people to die by the hundreds and thousands just to try to save its own reputation, because we are ruled by people unwilling or unable to admit they made a mistake.
Details will emerge about the gunman in Virginia, what happened and how. Most likely, those details will be human, and recognizable; sometimes people snap. Nothing will change, though, and it will happen again. After all, we know what is happening in Iraq, the how and the why, and we are not stopping it. Very few of us will ever pull a trigger, will ever kill another human being, but no one in this nation can claim innocence.
