America and the 911 Healing Process

I have been watching American and British TV coverage of the Tucson shootings since they occurred last Saturday, up to and including the President's Memorial Service last night in Tucson.
I went to the University of Arizona for two years and the places and names are familiar to me. They brought back memories of a real southwestern city, not too big, but big enough for Americans, Mexicans and American Indians, now called native Americans, to live together in harmony. The University,with its mission bell tower where we all celebrated each football or baseball victory, was a melting pot for Arizonans and Californians mostly, with some native Americans and Mexicans tossed in.
Tucson was bustling in the early 1960s. It had a downtown with a large department store named Goldwaters (that's right, Barry's family). It had wide open streets that stretched straight and long through town and into the desert.
The desert defines Tucson, really. It is a hot, dry marvel of a wilderness  that changes with every season, to display huge fields of spring desert flowers, rampaging arroyos of water when the rains come, and sunsets that no word or photograph can do justice to.
Tucson was a bastion of leather-skinned ranchers and retirees who played golf every day and drank tequila or Superior beer with real Mexican toasted tortillas and hotter than hot sauce every evening. The best restaurants were haciendas that served Mexican cuisine of an authenticity unlike anything Easterners raised on Taco Bell can imagine. Some were in town and many were on the edges of the desert, so that an evening meal became an encounter with visions that seemed to come from a southwestern art gallery.
The center of the downtown was owned by the regional Indian nation, Yaqui if my memory serves me right, and you could stroll along and engage them in vibrant conversation on any given afternoon. You could also buy real Indian silver jewelry from their street market, some of which I still possess and cherish.
If John Wayne could have picked his birthplace, it surely would have been Tucson.
So, what happened Saturday last in Tucson hurt me. It cut deep into my memories and made me realize that tragedy can rear its ugly head, even in a peaceful southwestern town.
And the national reaction, so sincere and so profoundly innocent, made me wonder how events in a local corner in southern Arizona, tragic and reprehensible as they were, could spawn such genuine grief and soul-searching across the entire nation.
I'm not a psychiatrist or sociologist, so I have no professional explanation to offer.
But, I deeply believe that it is a symptom of the continuing shock to the American conscience and psyche caused by 911. No other explanation makes sense to me.