on a much smaller scale, that whole ridiculous/spooky pizza bomber incident here last summer affected me surprisingly. Proportionate to the scale of the event being much smaller than Columbine, I wasn’t nearly as affected by it as you were. Yet there was something about it happening only five miles from here — something about the fact that I unknowingly came within a quarter mile of it and was redirected by the police shortly after it occurred because I hadn’t been tuned into the media and was planning to shop right across the street from it — that gave it a “whoa” quality that it wouldn’t have had if it had happened somewhere outside my orbit but still relatively near, like say Cleveland.

I wonder what it is about our natures that gives us this sense of ownership with things that are no more closely related to us than being physically closer than other equally serious matters?

On a much lesser scale, I remember them serving a warrant in Davie, Florida on the evening of 9/11 on a home that was three or four miles from mine. They believed it had housed some of the suspected hijackers. At that point, the anxiety level was breaking the meter, of course. I remember thinking “these people were HERE. I lived among them.” The Davie thing didn’t pan out, though a number of the hijackers did live within 15 or 20 miles of me.

Four of the hijackers lived less than a mile from my work in small neighborhood I lived in when I first moved down here. They bought plane tickets at travel agencies I know well and box cutters at a store I frequent.

The overriding feeling was disbelief at being in the presence of that sort of evil and not knowing it. It’s not just people “out there” who do these kinds of things, it’s people who I’m standing behind in the sandwich line at Subway. It causes you to look at people differently, I think.