Word: hurtfulness
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...After she left her dorm, Donohue's mind was still struggling to process what she had seen. By the time she reached her boyfriend at the cafeteria, she was trembling all over. "Something's the matter in my dorm, " she told him. "I think somebody got hurt badly. " Her boyfriend, who, like Donohue, is a member of Campus Crusade for Christ, prayed with her and walked her back to the dorm, but only because Donohue, still in shock, believed she needed to get lab goggles for her 8 a.m. chemistry class...
Hindsight blows just as strong through events like this. It's the nature of tragedy that it comes packaged in irony, sharp little stabs of coincidence that make it hurt even more: there was the Holocaust survivor who died trying to save his students from a mass murder committed on Holocaust Remembrance Day. There was the international-studies student who had seen the carnage at the Pentagon on 9/11 and wanted to be a peacemaker; he died in French class. There was the killer who signed into English class with a question mark, known by the few who knew...
...round, reloading his gun and firing another shot into the dead and wounded. He thinks he heard Cho reload three times, and at every shot he braced himself, thinking, "This one is for me." His mind wandered; he wondered what a gunshot wound feels like, how much it would hurt. He wondered if he would die slow or fast, and then he thought of his family. "I was terrified that my parents weren't going to be able to go on after I was gone." There was a student in front of him, also under a desk. He didn...
...exam easily, but to someone already highly sensitized to such setbacks, they can be intolerable. "These are people who are already angry," says Samenow, "and when things don't go the way they want them to, they personalize it. They take out their rage not on the person who hurt them last, but on the whole world...
...assuming that an unknown murderer won't leave the scene and keep shooting people - something almost no murderer does - is different from assuming that a person who has long been identified as a threat, as Cho had, won't hurt someone. The fateful decisions that cost the lives of 30 more people at Virginia Tech weren't made on Monday morning; they were made in the previous 18 months...