Desensitized

After the horrific murders at Virginia Tech, I thought the next day might be different. I thought that students that sit around me in class would be mournful, sad, concerned, angry, maybe even bitter, but they weren't. A few mentioned "that sucks" in passing, which only sounded like what you say right before you try to get out of a crappy boring conversation.
One of my professors (that I really look up to) asked that we spend the first 10 minutes of class talking about the Virginia Tech shootings. One of the guys said "what happened in Virginia?", to which I thought of how someone who stares at his laptop connected to the internet through entire class periods could not know! Two others claimed they heard about a shooting, but said they didn't know much about it. A few more had read the online updates and knew how many people were dead, and even the order of events, but still they were talking about it as if it was just another news story.
I was baffled and wondered if I was the only person in there who really knew the extent of what happened by it's effect on me. Then it dawned on me (and this is only my theory, I'm not a sociologist), this era of students have never known a world without regular school shootings, post office massacres, and the like. To them, the world works like that. And that's how it is. And they can't change that. If they could, they won't.