My daughter lives and works in northern VA. I just caught up with her, after 3 weeks, yesterday evening.

After the usual conversation -- who has changed jobs, who's getting married, what's going on with the family -- we turned to the events at VT.

Naturally, people she associates with are more upset than she is, because many of them have connections to VT. She has only lived in VA for a couple of years. We talked a little about aspects of the case. It didn't surprise me that she had given some thought to the mental illness component, because our family experience has been profoundly affected by her late grandmother's bipolar illness and community reaction to the problems created by it.

We both agreed that the shooter was waaay over the edge. We also both recognize that a tendency, even an eagerness, to turn away from those who are mentally ill rather than reaching out to them contributes to pushing people who are already not well farther into isolation.

We talked briefly about the punitive nature of behavior toward mentally ill people: mockery, fear, eviction, expulsion, abandonment, police intervention. My daughter, in high school, was the only person who approached her project during the study of To Kill A Mockingbird from the point of view of how we view the mentally ill, personified in Boo Radley. I had spent lots of time dealing with social service agencies and mental health professionals concerning her grandmother.

It works this way: Social service agencies only cooperate as long as the ill person follows the rules. People with mental illness are frequently marked by their unawareness of the rules or inability to follow rules. Mental health professionals' abilities to act are circumscribed by laws intended to protect eccentric but harmless citizens from abuse and false imprisonment. Any patients with real problems but canny, above average intelligence can talk their way through the legal protections and get themselves released. Answer the questions correctly and you're out. Families frequently give up out of exasperation and exhaustion. Other people in the community are frightened by, disapproving of, or disgusted by some of the behaviors of people with mental illness, and so the approach of larger community "care" tends more toward furtive observation and filing complaints than providing connection and support.

Then my daughter brought up something I didn't expect.

When she was in college, she started out as an architecture major before changing to electronic arts and communication. She's currently living in a modern designed suburb of a major metropolis, in her case DC. (The shooter grew up in a DC suburb of similar type, something which prompted this line of thought.) When they studied design of housing patterns and design of interior and exterior space, she told me, they learned that the modern urban suburb is deliberately put together so that people don't have to encounter their neighbors. Even mailbox placement makes it less likely that people will see each other. The home is a nest, a refuge, a place to hide from social pressures. There are no shops, no social meeting places. Shopping and work and cultural activities all involve driving. Schools are distant and centralized. She has tried to meet her neighbors. Out of a development of 50 homes, she recognizes maybe three families by sight, and only one to talk to. The design works. Isolation is encouraged. Community connection is discouraged. This is the new normal.

I protested that I grew up in a suburb and that so did she, and that this was not our experience. She disagreed. I, she pointed out (correctly, I have to admit), grew up in a village that became a suburb because of urban sprawl, yet still maintained its village feel and institutions. The housing patterns reflect this. She grew up in tract housing located in a semi-rural area associated with a small town, part of what she calls the experimental stage of suburban development, with large open yards and small houses located near each other on the streets. Though there are no nearby shops, the neighborhood has one important institution in common: the neighborhood public elementary school, which feeds the middle and high schools along with four others, thus drawing families, eventually, into the town and its social web. Community connections aren't universal, but they are present and hardy.

Then she pointed me at another phenomenon indicative of growing sociopathy resulting from lack of social contact and increased objectification of human beings: teenagers and young adults beating up homeless people for fun. Though the tragedy at VT is different in scale and choice of victims, she sees a similar type of disconnection in the perps in these cases, minus the serious overlying psychosis displayed by the VT shooter (see the discussion of mental illness and society, above). Young people with a poorly formed social conscience and a stunted community experience objectify other people to use for their own purposes because it's easy to do so, not having enough person-to-person contact to develop empathy with others.

"People keep telling me that bigger is better, and that gated suburbs are good things. I keep telling them, no, they're wrong," she said. "We need smaller places to live, and for kids to grow up in, so they can learn how a community works and how to relate to other people. If we keep turning away from each other, we're only going to get sicker."

Now, I know that the VT shooter, though ill, was responsible for the choice he made to take more than 30 people with him as part of his self-destruction. Yet we can't afford to brush this off as a freak event. We are having more and more "freak events". After a while, we'll have to start thinking about whether we have developed an environment that incubates freak events. Sooner better than later, imo.

Another way of putting it: If the VT shooter had shot a couple dozen homeless men and then himself, would we be spending the kind of time on this that we are? Would we even care if the murders hadn't taken the lives of people we think of as those we would like to know? When will we start to examine the ways in which we turn away from others and start the process of reincorporating our communities to include social contact with those who live near us, regardless of whether they make us feel good about ourselves?

In the old days, people would talk about "the village idiot". Surely the term is not a complimentary, but it does imply a certain sense of belonging and ownership. The idiot had a village then to keep an eye on him and to (even grudgingly) look out for him. Now we have no village, and the idiot is looking out for himself.