Things suddenly get uncomfortably close

I was having dinner in a bar and watching some college basketball last night when they switched over to the breaking news about the shooting at Northern Illinois University. At the time I registered it as another tragic event in the numbing litany of death and destruction that human beings are constantly inflicting on each other, but that detached emotional response was shattered this afternoon.

I've been working to reactivate the chapter of the English honor society Sigma Tau Delta here at DU, and this afternoon I was meeting with the treasurer to open a checking account for the chapter. As is often the case with that sort of seemingly simple task, we hit a roadblock when they needed a faxed confirmation from the society's central office. It should have been a simple enough thing to call them up and have them fax it over, but no one answered the phone when we called. It seemed odd, but we left a message and then tried to continue preparing to open the account. We got everything else in order, and they hadn't called back, so we were about to try again when I had a flash of realization.

As you may have already guessed, the central office of Sigma Tau Delta is in the English department at Northern Illinois University, which I'd known all along, but it wasn't until that moment that I put two and two together. The realization that the people suffering on television last night were the same ones I was talking to on the phone just a couple days ago was an unexpected shock. All of a sudden what had been a distant tragedy was brought uncomfortably close.