The worst

When the nor'easter relented enough Monday evening for PECO to get the power back on, I learned about the horrible news from Virginia Tech.

Just awful.

The tragic facts stream through the prism of cable news. The studied somber tones that barely mask the eager excitement over the Big Story. From every outlet, giddy superlatives. "The worst shooting massacre in U.S. history," said The Washington Post, and CNN, and ABC and even NPR.

What is it that makes us need events to be superlative? The horror of Monday's tragedy is neither enhanced nor diminished by whether or not some other tragic event was quantifiably "worse," so why this insistence on ranking tragedies like some macabre Top-40 countdown?

Partly, I think, it's the lazy trend of quantifying and ranking everything, from box office returns to fallen soldiers. The deadliest day, the biggest opening weekend, the worst massacre.

And partly, I think, it's the desperate need to believe we're special people living in special times, in "the most critical time in the history of the world."

In today's paper, the very same paper in which we reprint the "worst in U.S. history" description, we also preview a lecture tonight at the state university. The speaker will by Larry Colburn, who helped to stop the killing at My Lai. The monument at My Lai bears the names of 504 victims.

That massacre, it seems, does not count in the rankings. Nor does Balangiga, or Marias or Mountain Meadows. And so the rankings, it seems, involve some unspoken qualifications, the unpacking and exploring of which might be fruitful, but not just now.

Just now I don't much care about the ranking of sorrows.

It doesn't matter to anyone whether this was the "worst" event of its kind, it was worse than bad enough. Sorrow, death and tragedy are not a competition. Comparisons may be helpful as an exercise in empathy. But rankings are utterly pointless.