Online community and tribute

A rough count tonight shows that about 10% of my facebook.com friends have changed their profile pictures to honor and remember the dead at Virginia Tech. (I changed mine, too.) The most common pic (and the one I chose) is shown at left, and it was often accompanied by a logo from my friends' home universities and a slogan similar to "Today we are all Hokies". I've been thinking how our youth culture of today is very different from our parents', and even more than our grandparents', but we definitely have several things in common: a need for community and a desire for joint expressions of grief. Just a few thoughts from tonight.