Violent crises have a strange way of occurring at inconvenient times. There is of course no ideal moment for a war or terrorist attack, but when such events do take place, it often feels like they couldn’t have arrived at a worse time.

Though I have never personally encountered anything close to this, I have noticed an odd correspondence between some of the recent instances of violence around the world and my breaks from school. The failed bomb explosion on the flight to Detroit happened on Christmas Day 2009, the Arizona shooting was during winter break and, most recently, the bombing of Libya was over spring break.

The upside of this — if I can be callous enough to suggest there is an upside — is that school breaks allow me more time to stay up-to-date on the status of a given tragedy. The downside is that breaks generally come after an intense week of tests and papers and the subsequent shutdown of my brainstem. Not having that brainstem up to snuff can make pursuing information of even modest importance seem like climbing Mount Everest.

Because these occurrences seem to happen frequently and are so far removed from anything most of us could ever relate to, it can be difficult to feel the empathy one would hope to in such a scenario. When I see footage of police tape surrounding a grocery store or buildings leveled by bombs, I have little more than episodes of “24” to draw upon for comparisons. The more I see these images, the more they seem like a recycled movie plot.

Occasionally, however, there is a photo, video clip or some other anecdote that rips me from this numbness, awakening me to the significance of what is actually happening.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, I remember being profoundly moved by the stories of the passengers on United Airlines 93 calling their loved ones before organizing a revolt that kept the terrorists piloting the plane from killing others. After the Arizona shooting in January, it was President Obama’s tribute to 9-year-old Christina-Taylor Green that helped me feel a deeper connection to the victims of that senseless violence.

Now, as the U.S. and other countries bomb Libya, I have once again struggled to find resonance with this conflict in a way that respects it as a unique event impacting unique individuals. This is hard to do because the media makes a point of comparing Libya and Muammar el-Qaddafi to Iraq and Saddam Hussein. As far as I could see, Libya was just another wrecked country in the Middle East.

My perspective changed after I received word that a police officer responding to an emergency call in my hometown of Fond du Lac, Wis. was shot to death as he entered the home involved in the call last Sunday. Knowing the area where the shooting took place and having friends who were close enough to hear the gunfire, it was not hard for me to feel great sadness for the fallen officer and those who knew him.

As I read another update on the fighting in the Middle East later, I couldn’t separate the completely dissimilar and unrelated shooting in Fond du Lac from descriptions of the Libyan conflict. Just as family and friends are mourning the fallen officer, so are there countless Libyans mourning the loss of their family members at the hands of their government.

All too often, the people whose lives are affected by war and violence are obscured by so-called “big picture” issues. A shooting degenerates into a bitter debate about gun control, a terrorist attack becomes an argument about airline security and a war creates fierce disputes about coalition building.

While these are all valid concerns, we should not forget that the outcomes of these conversations and the images we see on television ultimately affect real lives. Surely, we each would want to be acknowledged and respected as individuals if some kind of violence or unrest were to impact our lives. Similarly, we should remember the people who are affected by what happens in Libya for who they are: people.