Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
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Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Va. Tech aftermath: The other victims
On Sept. 11, 2001, I was supposed to work a late shift. Somewhere between 8:15 and 8:30 a.m. I departed my back porch for a five-mile run.
I have said many times I walked down those steps in one world and back up them into a completely different world.
In those pre-iPod days, I was actually listening to the radio in my headphones as I finished and heard tell of the attacks just as I was walking back up those steps to my house. I walked in, flipped on the television and stood there stunned for several minutes before I called my brother in New York City and my parents in Los Angeles.
I grew up in New Jersey, just 45 minutes from New York City. As a kid, I rooted for New York sports teams, watched New York television news each night, read New York newspapers and made occassional trips into the city. As the story of that day unfolded, the attack felt strangely personal. Even though I hadn’t lived in the New York area in a decade.
I’ve thought from time to time since about this phenomenon — collateral damage that more “removed” victims of these sorts of tragedies feel, even if they are not among the frontline victims and their friends and families.
In the Journal News, a suburban New York newspaper, columnist Sam Borden revists the Virginia Tech tragedy through the eyes of some of its athletes. It’s a gripping narrative, and really gives a glimpse of what the aftermath of something like this is like for regular kids who were not directly affected.
Because they feel it too.
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