There were some people, in the days and weeks following last month’s tragic shooting in Powhatan, who questioned the media’s coverage of the event. As the news trucks and reporters gathered outside the courthouse, or swarmed around the families of both the victims and the accused, there were those who asked why this case should get so much attention when there are so many other violent acts, so many more deaths, that receive little to no attention at all.

Of course, this case is unusual; as so many people said, “this sort of thing just doesn’t happen here.”

In those first few days, as we all struggled to make sense of it, to find some meaning in what had happened not just to these families but to all of us, I could think of only two possibilities.

Perhaps the violence that pervades so many “other places,” the random sort we don’t mind watching on television or letting our children hear glorified in popular music, had finally begun seeping into our own community. Perhaps this was only the beginning of a downward spiral, in which the community we call home would be slowly taken over by the kind of senseless violence that has become “normal” in places we like to think are far away.

There was another, more likely scenario, of course, and this is the one that I think many of us have begun to embrace over the past few weeks.

Maybe the violence that occurred on June 24 was simply an isolated incident, one which actually served to unite rather than divide this community. Despite the unimaginable loss it has left us with, maybe it will serve as the spark that will help teach our young people what life—and death—actually means.

I shudder to think how many incidences of violence I have seen on television in just the past few weeks alone.

Watching the number one movie in America, The Dark Knight, which critics have been tripping over themselves to recommend, you can see more people being shot dead in the first half hour than you can count on two hands.

The idea, I suppose, is that most of these people are “bad,” human garbage who really don’t matter anyway. And the movie has its origins in the world of comic books, where it’s admittedly easier to draw the line between fiction and reality.

But that does little to dismiss the countless other instances in which bloody scenes are par for the course. The videogames where the idea is to kill as many people as possible. The miniseries where 10 people are mowed down per episode. The song that introduces a handful of new, catchy euphemisms for “murder.”

Are our children smart enough to distinguish between the violence they see on television and the reality of a family losing a son, or a brother? Many of them probably are. But why does violence have to be so prevalent in the entertainment we market to them? No one glorifies child abuse. You rarely see animal abuse portrayed in any form in popular entertainment. Yet scenes in which scores of human beings are gunned down are seen as blasé.

As we heal from this, however, and as we continue to move forward, I hope we take a long, hard look at what we allow ourselves to condone, even passively.

I want to believe that the murder of Tahliek Taliaferro was as isolated incident, far removed from the casual violence we hear referenced on the nightly news.

But even an isolated incident, if it robs a family of a child, or a community of a kind, talented young man, is one incident too many.