People are scared now. You can hear it in their voices – the way the pitch gets higher, the resonance shakier – whenever someone brings up the Virginia Tech shootings that caused 33 deaths Monday.

You can detect it in their words, posted on message boards in attempt to find a scapegoat to blame for the tragedy: the NRA, Virginia Tech campus police, the war in Iraq. These reactions are the signs of fear.

Like the tragedies that preceded it, the Virginia shootings highlight America’s best and worst. On the upside, it shows our support for one another in the midst of defeat. It brings out our resilience and determination to cope. It reminds the majority of us, so removed from horrific pain and suffering, that we can empathize with people a lot like us who are now experiencing those things.

But that empathy also catalyzes our panic: It makes us realize that we could have just as easily been the victims.

We know we live in a scary world. The daily news reminds us of the genocides, suicide bombings and war casualties taking place overseas. Events such as Sept. 11 and the London train bombings bring terrorism home.

Still, many of us still tend to view these things as problems of the Third World. After all, we’re Americans. We’ve got heightened airport security and top-notch intelligence to take care of the danger posed by terrorist threats. We can protect ourselves with wiretapping and the PATRIOT Act.

Then events like Monday’s shooting hit, and we’re reminded that we’re not invincible. Terrorism isn’t just a problem in Baghdad and the Gaza Strip; it strikes in sleepy Colorado suburbs and Amish communities – places that are supposed to be safe zones.

Destruction isn’t just the making of extremists riding in airplanes or wearing bombs. It can come from a peer – an English major who blends in with the rest of us, who is supposed to be one of us.

Now another everyday institution has been violated, adding to the list of high schools, office buildings, restaurants, transportation lines and post offices hit in the past.

Americans will respond, as usual, by trying to take control. We’ll hold vigils and create Facebook groups to comfort our peers. We’ll strengthen campus security and protest handgun ownership. We’ll institute criminal background checks as part of college admissions. At least in the immediate future, even reckless college students will live a little more cautiously and appreciatively with newfound awareness that, contrary to our popular belief, we’re not invincible.

As Tuesday’s editorial in the American-Statesman of Austin, Texas, reminds us, we live in a different world today than when that city was home to a massacre at the University of Texas in 1966. We’re so used to violence these days that we try to forget how it can penetrate our lives and evoke our deepest fears.

All it takes is a day like Monday to remind us.