Today, we are all Dukies

I got a lesson on the differences between men and women when Heath Ledger died. Whenever I told a girl about it, she was shocked and saddened. Whenever I told a guy about it, he wanted to know if the next "Batman" movie was cancelled.

There's something about senseless tragedies that brings out these basic responses. In the case of Ledger's death, these responses were short-lived and vapid, but in other situations they can be much more impressive. The prime example is our response after the Sept. 11 attacks, when our country was briefly unified as a community with a definite sense of purpose. More recently, the Virginia Tech massacre rallied college students and young people together and we all mourned on a grand scale.

But I think there's something inexplicable about the reaction to the Virginia Tech shooting, something that sets it apart from the other examples. A massive emotional response to 9/11 is to be expected. After all, for a day we stalled in front of television screens watching the grisly video loop of the planes hitting. An almost dismissive response to Heath Ledger's death is callous, but not unexpected. He was a good actor, but to most of us that was about it.

However, the response to the deaths of other college students was almost overwhelming, especially on social networking sites. I remember a few days after the Tech shooting, looking on at a Facebook group with 80,000 members. The six randomly selected user pictures on the page were all black ribbons with Tech's logo emblazoned across them. The odds of this happening are, to me, staggering. A huge number of people must have decided to show their sorrow for the victims in this way. The phrase "Today, we are all Hokies," was ubiquitous across the Internet. From what I could tell, this was as common among Duke students as anywhere else.

But why this huge outpouring of emotion? Most of us didn't know the people killed, and the deaths had little impact on our lives at all. We weren't at war or even inconvenienced in the slightest. Va. Tech barely pricks our consciousness unless we're playing basketball against them. Maybe the purely random nature of the deaths made us fear our own eventual demises; after all, these were college students, just like us, who unexpectedly perished. Our own expressions of remorse were a way of dealing with our own fears about death.

But what I find the most odd is the way in which the crime directed toward Duke students in Durham a few weeks ago didn't receive the same level of emotional response as the deaths of strangers hundreds of miles away. A fellow Duke student was killed, senselessly, but I saw few expressions of sorrow or pity aside from the administration's public statements. Certainly no one expressed to me the same kind of shock they did after the Virginia Tech massacre. It was mostly grim resignation.

But why? The senselessness of this young death was no less striking than the Tech tragedy. Are we just tired of talking about the chafing points between Duke and Durham where things like this sometimes happen? Do we not want to face tragedy so close to home? I wish I had the answer. But if ever there was a commentary on the state of the Duke community, I think this is it.

It continues a trend of having social problems at Duke dealt with from the top down. The administration, through e-mails and public meetings, attempts to assuage the sadness of the student body and the public, whether it actually exist or not.

Frank Holleman is a Trinity junior. His column runs every other Monday.