Rosa Brooks delivers a much-deserved smacking today:

There's something fraudulent about this eagerness to latch onto the grief of others and embrace the idea that we, too, have been victimized. This trivializes the pain felt by those who have actually lost something and pathologizes normal reactions to tragedy.

Most of us don't know anyone who died at Virginia Tech, or even anyone who knows any of the victims, which is why any so-called "grief" or "trauma" on our part is absurd and fraudulent. Call it the JonBenet effect.

Grief is an emotional reaction to an immediate loss, understandable when you have lost something or someone important to your life. While we all may be parts of the human continent, the loss of some distant peninsula is not a personal loss. We may be saddened by genocide in Darfur, or angered that our government is not doing more to stop it, but the proper response is a cold, determined, calculated effort to prevent future deaths, not demonstrations of "grief" for people we don't know.