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I drove to a tough section of Los Angeles this morning to report a story.  Naturally, I was wondering about the safety of the location, wondering where I'd park, what to leave in the car, what to take with me. While driving, the news about the tragic shooting rampage at Virginia Tech hit the airwaves.  Only then, that early in the morning on West Coast time, it wasn't a rampage, but a single death.

As the day ground on, the news of a single death turned into news of a blood bath. I couldn't help thinking of the irony of my early morning expedition into LA and how had I worried for my safety.

But, as this morning reminded me, violence can happen anywhere.  Anytime.  It happens in war-torn places all around the world, right now; it happens in our own schools, in neighborhoods, in homes, in streets.  

When I returned to school this morning after my work in Los Angeles, I heard from a colleague that some students planning to go to college in Virginia were scared.  Strange how news of violence makes geography become distorted, along with our sense of safety.  Places become closer, somehow, when there is bad news.

This reminded me of the morning of 9/11, when I had to collect myself and come to school while wondering whether friends and family were all right in New York and on the East Coast in general.  One of my students that day was afraid that her mom, a judge, would be hurt because she worked in a tall building in Los Angeles. I had to tell her that I didn't think anything would happen to her mom, that I imagined that the killing was done for that day, at least.

Later this afternoon, I talked with a close friend about the massacre; she had been teaching the entire day and hadn't heard the news.  She was thinking about her kids in college; I started thinking about how my girls, one day, will be away from me and in college too.  How those Virginia Tech families must be feeling.

I wonder how the world might change if we could all just remember that sense of closeness we have when we hear the bad news of violence -- those moments when the world is somehow smaller, geographically condensed, all of us linked together by common threads of love for family, love for friends, love for place.