Americans Are United in Horror; Essay; after an Unspeakable Tragedy, How Do We Talk about It?

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Now and then, thanks to the strange intimacy of technology, there are times in modern American lives when our most momentous and harrowing experiences have been shared.

In the days when radios were still furniture, we listened and poured out into the streets on V-E Day and V-J Day. Comforted by Walter Cronkite's voice, we mourned around the collective video campfire when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Through the eyes of correspondents in the desert, we watched during the first Persian Gulf War as the Scuds and Patriot missiles streaked through the skies.

The world is more fragmented now, the national watercooler a relic of another, rapidly receding age. Now we can …