Why is this happening?

The Virginia Tech Campus shooting is all over the news. There is a tendency to rationalise this, look for motivation, motives, "try to learn from it" so that it may not be repeated. This is a defence mechanism. We take things in our stride and move on. This is how we survive traumatic events. This is how we have reacted since 9/11, the London Tube bombs, the Madrid train bomb, the Iraq War.

It's like an escalating sledge ride down a mountainside strewn with boulders and trees and crevasses and we keep going faster and faster, each bump or narrow call being just another thing that did not kill us and which we can learn from to avoid the next one, and our speed is picking up.

The question has to be: "Why is this happening?" How did life, which we used to hold sacred, suddenly become so cheap?

I really do not have the answer here. Just the questions. The sense that it is not as it should be. When students go to lessons and don't come back, when stockbrokers go to work and don't come back, when commuters get on trains and don't come back you need to ask why. Why?

This is not the world I thought I survived the chances of a nuclear war for. This is not the world that used to inspire me to leap out of bed in the morning, revelling in the feeling of being alive. Being part of something bigger and more beautiful and more lasting than myself.

This is a dystopian nightmare. How can we make it stop?