I don’t know what to think about this…I honestly dont. Any conclusions I draw here shouldn’t be held against me because I’m past the point of ‘belief’ about this kind of stuff. At best, the following is a highly structured weak opinion.
That being said, I had a strange conversation last night. Two very smart people that I respect a lot cornered me into a conversation about Virgina Tech. My general reaction to these things is, I think, fairly normal. I go in for the sensational story, put myself in the shoes of the people involved…the cops, the teachers, the students and, yes, the shooter. I play out scenes in my head using the scant bits of news that leaked out in the early hours after the shootings.
From this I gain nothing important. I don’t get any new insight on the incident. Mostly, I just get kinda excited… Maybe excited is the wrong word. I guess it could be a kind of adrenaline rush, to think about something that horrible happening in such a familiar scenario. The overall sense is: **That Could Easily Have Happened To Me.** Which, for Americans like me, who do mostly the same thing every day, is almost a welcome thought.
And so it’s exciting and scary and we eat it up like this season’s hit horror movie. And then we pretend that the reason we care is that we value life so highly.
All those beautiful exceptional lives filled with potential. All those poets and physicists and tomorrow’s rocket scientists ’snuffed out.’ We don’t say what we think. We think about them bleeding on the ground wearing the faces of our friends and family wailing in agony in roughly drawn with a scene from Law and Order that we once saw. The individuals only matter to us because we can so easily see our sons and daughters and wives and husbands…and selves…there in those classrooms.
So those two people that I respect so highly, what was their reaction? “I can’t believe we spend so much time talking about all those ‘beautiful lives,’ as if none of the 230 people who died in Iraq the same day had beautiful lives,” and “That poor kid…everyone, EVERYONE, failed him.” This last bit, in reference to the shooter.
My reaction…”AHHHHH GET ME OUT OF HERE!!!” I, honestly, didn’t want an opinion. With enough brain power, you can sympathize with anyone. A bleeding heart takes a lot of work sometimes, but it can be done. Osama Bin Laden had the same drive for power as any young man. George W Bush believes that controlling the middle east will make American more powerful. If someone had been nice to Cho Seung-hui, he wouldn’t have shot fifty people.
The only thing I said during the conversation was “it’s natural to care more about the things you understand.” Which is entirely true.
What I should have said was, “It takes a tremendous amount of time and cultural molding to say what you just said.”
Most people in America are so numb to community and empathy that they don’t ever think about the difference between an iraqi and a college student. It’s not a moral question they have the time or energy to even pose, let alone answer. To care as much about a dead iraqi as a dead blond girl who was just about to graduate…is, I think, impossible. We just know more, understand more, and have an entire lifetimes worth of values in place that make it impossible.
It’s not right, but it’s natural. To get angry at the national media for providing people with what they’re naturally interested in, I guess maybe you can, but it’s not gonna do you any good. I guess the least we can do is recognize, the ones of us who think anyhow, that we don’t care because we value life highly. We care because it’s familiar and we’re hardwired to understand and empathize more easily with the familiar.
So there, I said it: ** I care more about VT students. That’s wrong. I can’t help it. Screw You Guys…I’m goin’ home. **
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