I don't really have the time or energy to speak as deeply as i'd like to about this (although i'd sure like to find some of both.) but i will say that knowing people who lived through Columbine and growing up in a world where this type of behavior has become increasingly acceptable, that at no time in my entire college career did i go to sleep in my dorm room, walk through campus or attend class with the slightest inclination that someone might go apeshit and shoot me or my classmates. It never went through my mind. And now that i think about it, it was completely possible that it could have happened. It should have happened. In fact, it still might. All the ingredients are in place.
The two schools i attended, CU and ASU, had such a diverse and completely disconnected student population. There were the rich, out-of-state kids (of which i was arguably one) that walk around like their shit doesn't stink and there were the not-so-rich, in-state kids that could have come from anywhere with any type of background. These two colleges were just as cliquey and segregated and unfair as high school was. Maybe worse. I feel that i am a fairly normal and balanced person but there were times at both of those schools where i felt so alone and so brushed aside by every other person around me and so absolutely forgotten about. I'm a generally happy and decent person and if i felt this way at times, i can only imagine the thousands of other students that must have felt/feel the same way, if not hundreds of times worse. It now occurs to me that it is an absolute miracle that a similar massacre has not happened before and does not happen more frequently.
With that said, this was not my intention in this post. My intention was to call attention to this screen capture of MSNBC that i just saw:
I don't know how well you'll be able to see it (click on it and it'll get bigger) but the image above is from the main page of the Va Tech story on MSNBC.com in which 33 people, including the shooter, died. Now i'm not diminshing the loss of human life at all. A life is a life is a life. They're all equal in my book and one person being killed is one too many as far as i'm concerned but what kills me (sorry, bad term) is the story at the bottom of the column that says "Top MSNBC Stories." If you can't see it, again, i'll tell you what it says... "183 killed in a 4 Baghdad Blasts."
183?!?!?! One Hundred and Eighty Fucking Three! Our nation goes into mourning and the President drops everything to go to the college and speak when 33 people are killed, yet every single day a headline like the Baghdad one slides right by on the ticker and we barley even fucking blink. This is so typical and indicative of everything that is wrong with this country, our society and humanity as a whole.
1,200 people died in Hurricane Katrina and we're still talking about it. And we'll still be talking about it during this entire summer's hurricane season and during next year's Super Bowl in New Orleans. When's the last time you heard about, or even thought about, the 250,000 people killed in the Indonesian Tsunami? That's a quarter of a million people just wiped off the face of the earth and we declare a national day of mourning for 33?
3,000 people died on 9-11 and we've killed somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,000 times (and counting) that many, just to get even for it. That would be like us bombing South Korea because of what this kid did. Seems stupid right? Well, we're doing it every day. (And don't put it past ol Georgie to think about attacking Seoul. Honestly, would it surprise you?)
Mothers die by the thousands from AIDS in Africa. Millions of people are killed in Ugandan genocide. Hundreds of thousands of children die every day from starvation. And the U.S. is getting letters of condolence from every leader in the free world for 33?!?
I'm not taking anything away from those 32 (i'm not counting the murderer, fuck him) people who were killed this week. Don't get me wrong. Their lives were stolen from them selfishly by a sad and ignorant person who needed attention and that is an absolutely tragedy if and whenever it happens.
All i'm saying is that something isn't right with this picture. Something is Majorly. Fucked. Up.
3 comments:
Nothing to say other than to express how bummed out I am.
Your words resonate with me...I think I am still trying to garner the courage to say them.
A couple things.
I agree. The disportionate response is sad and I think it taps into our selfcenteredness as Americans. What happened last week was horrific and I grieve for the many families and students that have had their lives drastically rocked by this experience. At the same time I think your comments pont to the fact that this event, as well as 911 and Katrina, scares the shit out of us. It scares us because like you said, it could happen to us. We are removed from Tsunami/Iraq/Darfur and we aren't worried about Janjaweed or U.S. troops knocking down our doors in the middle of the night. But these events could happen to us, and we don't want to suffer/die/or think bad things. Yet we have this obsession with these homebased events and we want to know as much as possible about them, perhaps so we can explain to ourselves why we are safe even though these people weren't. That is the other thing I noticed in your picture, ADD MASSACRE VIRGINIA TECH TO YOUR NEWS READER. WTF. Is it just me or is that a little disturbing? Is this not a morbid fascination we have with atrocities, that we would want to add something this heartbreaking to our news reader. This is not TV or the movies, people died.
Post a Comment