This recent, rabid gunman killed and injured too many. There will also be those families, friends, fellow students, and even many delicate young minds, who find that post-traumatic stress visits the grief that underlies grief. It does not need a war, even though we have one, to create the battle-scarred and shell-shocked. Virginia provided them, as did Columbine, the mass killings of women in Ciudad Juarez, the severed heads in Acapulco, the tsunami, and the legion of killers who sap the life out of America in the anonymity of endless highways and anomic sameness.

Lord Peter Whimsey suffered it from the trenches of Europe in that stiff-upper-lipped British society. He had Bunter the valet to care for him and sweet mysteries to saunter through. He could still say, "Toodle-pip" even if the bloody fields came to him in nightmares. The real stuff is the sad grit of life and death. It is the horror that undoes the human condition or is, perhaps, the base of the human condition.

It is insidious when it hides behind grief and mourning. It is the step beyond. The victims are those who cannot stop grieving.

I planned to write this week on a Steven King novel of little substance (but fun) or the E. Annie Proulix novel, The Shipping News , but I am still enjoying reading it. Then came the sadness and depression of a world that seems to be suffering collective post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The Monster of Virginia changed my mind. Instead I thought that this is the important subject to keep in front of the public; in front of parents who may need to help children cope, to help young people weather their sadness and fear.

Even doubting the myths of heaven and hell, I believe fervently in the dichotomy of good and evil. Evil lurks and, if allowed, festers, boils, and strikes. The hurt hurts and subsides or, for some it dominates and disables. That is the nature of post-traumatic stress.

It is a kind of anxious reaction triggered "... by an extremely traumatic event." It can happen when that event happens to you or to another or others. It does not have to be the blood bath in Virginia or the Muslim murders of innocents in Iraq or Israel. The disorder can be a result of sexual or physical assault, airplane crashes, cataclysmic natural events as well as the horrors of war, torture, or damage and death of one you love, your classmates, or pals.

It needn't be totally direct. Rescue workers who work too long with gunshot victims and car smashes, those who attend mass tragedies suffer the "fear, helplessness or horror" that is this stress disorder. It is real. It can be serious or deadly. Telling someone who is being dominated by unending grief and horror to "snap out of it" doesn't cut it.