where were you/what were you doing/what were you feeling/when?

[sabotabby]

It's perversely fascinating reading LJ several days after a tragic newsworthy event. Most people on my friends list, for example, are aware at some level that 35,000 children die every day from preventable diseases, and this is a tragedy, but none of us blog every day about the 35,000 children who die every day from preventable diseases. It's usually the unexpected mass deaths that fire up the collective imagination.

Well, we don't know those children. But most of us don't know anyone who went to Virginia Tech either, but a lot of us are overwhelmingly upset and touched by the lives and deaths of people we never met. I'm disinclined to say anything cynical about that; I mean, I have that same reaction. (And check out the spike in the numbers of LJers who were "sad" or "shocked" over the past few days.)

At any rate, I have a theory that a lot of us react to high-profile tragedies in bizarre ways that we tend not to talk about. Accordingly, a poll:


[Poll #969519]

Comments

[peterbilt-47.livejournal.com]

What is this "media blackout" thing you speak of?

Right after I heard the news, I thought to myself (as I don't personally know anyone at VTech) "jeez. That's messed up. I wonder how a person gets to the point in their minds where they can go and do that? I wonder if we could all be different to each other such that they didn't, or not as often? Probably. But probably also somebody's going to go batshit crazy in a very tragic way every once in awhile no matter what. I wonder who wants to join me for Chinese tonight?"

Like the loss of the Rain Forests, it's the kind of thing that sits in the back of your mind as "really bad, but basically an abstraction, outside my sphere of influence, and therefore where shall we eat?" Were someone to provide small, concrete actions I could take to contribute to a solution, I would likely take them. Until then, the new Indian restaurant in town is quite good.

[sabotabby]

What is this "media blackout" thing you speak of?

Deliberately refusing to read, watch, or listen to any news stories about it until the media calms the fuck down.

I basically had a lot of thoughts run through my head: "Is there anything I can do about it? No? Or at least not right now. On to something else, I guess." But it was way before dinner.

[lokilokust.livejournal.com]

the first i heard about was after the second incident, and one of the things i thought was 'wait... people were shot two hours before and no one thought to cancel classes or evacuate?'

[sabotabby]

I thought that too, but I have some sympathy for the administration after I heard that the campus layout is similar in size and geography to UofT. If something like that happened here, it would be difficult to get the word out and evacuate. It might be slightly easier in Toronto because it's a large urban centre, and you could get police in relatively quickly to shut down that part of the city, but who knows how smoothly it would run?

This said, there's a darker element, and that's the immediate assumption that the first two shootings were the result of a "domestic incident"—basically, I heard that the authorities thought that it was a pissed-off ex-boyfriend that shot the first girl and her neighbour, and didn't consider that enough reason to cancel classes. If that's actually the case, then *rage*.

[chibibluebird.livejournal.com]

The internet has significantly increased the number of people I know & also who're likely to have something really bad happen to them. Especially violence, given their geographic distribution, and um. mine. I often don't know how I should react when something does happen.

[sabotabby]

Same here. There's also the friends-and-family-of-friends thing, so if I hear about flooding in Indonesia, it's not necessarily immediate concern for someone I know, but I'll be anxious to make sure that my friends' families are okay.

I think this is healthy, in a way.

way more than you wanted to know

[mistersmearcase.livejournal.com]

My reactions are kind of all over the map. I heard about it, thought "aw jeez" but filed it under "another awful thing happens," put it out of my head, read more about it later in the day, decided not to say anything about it, posted about some dumb thing or other and then tacked on "yeah I know, but I don't feel like posting about it," and then over the next day tried just to dismiss it from my head when it came up since I can't do anything about it and am skeptical of the worth of vicarious mass mourning (seems self-aggrandizing in a way), had one really inappropriate reaction that being "Oh, hey, he killed more people than Whitman, my alma mater no longer is the standard-bearer, woo hoo!", gave in and read a little about the guy, wondered what kind of crazy-ass laws they're going to pass about therapists that won't prevent this from happening again but will add to the bureaucracy in the world, blew the topic off when my mother brought it up, tried to imagine being the guy who did it, felt rotten for the families of the folks that died, felt weepy reading about the holocaust survivor who saved his students because I'm a sucker for that kind of story, thought about gun control and decided it probably wouldn't have helped though I'm still in favor of it anyway...

No ticky box for that reaction?

Re: way more than you wanted to know

[florence-craye.livejournal.com]

Yeah, gun control might not have helped in that case but it is still a good idea. I don't know how someone gets to the point where more guns is always the answer. WTF?

[realcdaae.livejournal.com]

What were the plays?

I've read about it all over my flist, but haven't gone to any of the news articles to read details, or watched or read the news in days. I kind of felt weird not saying anything about it on my LJ, but I really have nothing to say. Of course it's a terrible thing, of course my sympathies are with anyone who knew anyone who was there, but knowing more details about it isn't going to change my life, or anything else. I suppose I mentally filed it under the "another awful thing happens" area too.

I'm curious to know what the plays were though; and I do always get frustrated by the way people leap in to say "well, he was reading this/playing that/listening to that/wearing this, so those things are bad and dangerous". Asshats.

[florence-craye.livejournal.com]

I think they were plays he wrote in class, and they were both violent as far as I know. I haven't read either.

[florence-craye.livejournal.com]

Eh, I laughed at a joke made by a faculty member when the first news got out. We had just solved a problem with his email program, and he joked that maybe the shooter had a problem with Mulberry. I laughed and agreed. So I felt complicit enough to ticky that box.

One of my first thoughts was that it must have been a man, very likely a white man, who did it. I was wrong on half of it but it doesn't matter anyway.

If there's a flood/tsunami/plane crash in Indonesia, I actually feel more sad than hearing about something bad happening here in the states. I think it's because I have known people who are from there and also being really interested in it that I feel some greater connection, however true or not that connection is.

[sabotabby]

I think the other thing is that the social changes that one envisions preventing school shootings are pretty subtle and hard to identify. Whereas it's quite easy to imagine a world in which floods and tsunamis in Indonesia could not have anywhere near the death toll that they generally do. We can't help that it's surrounded by water, but it tends to be the poverty that makes natural disasters so devastating.

[begundan.livejournal.com]

Well, I heard the radio say something in the other room on that afternoon. I was working with a student at the time and calmly commented something like: "Yeah, these things happen every once in a while". I guess it's something along the lines of the 35,000 children, or the "just another day in Baghdad". But the truth is that, having grown up in Israel, I don't really think about such things anymore. Experience showed, that nothing new is ever said on such topics (and we both know that this includes both your blog entry and this comment), so such news just don't trigger my thought process anymore.
Actually, I was making up a scenario in which I save the day by stopping the shooter. While I know that this is disturbingly unoriginal, I'm old enough not to care anymore.
In other news, Finch station was closed for some time yesterday. They say someone jumped on the tracks.

[sabotabby]

In other news, Finch station was closed for some time yesterday. They say someone jumped on the tracks.

How do you find that out? I heard that people jump on the tracks all the time, but you never hear about it unless someone gets pushed. [/morbid fascination]

[hopita.livejournal.com]

Shortly after hearing about the massacre at VTech, I turned off the TV and went on about my business -- I suspect I was on my way to work. In that newscast (noon on the day of the shootings), they started by saying something like nine people suspected shot and ended the newscast by saying twenty, possibly twenty two.

I checked no ticky boxes for the first question because, while technically I engaged in a media blackout, it wasn't a philosophical, intentional media blackout -- I just went on about my business.'

And another random thought: I expected a tragedy round about now. It's nearly 4/20 (Hitler! Columbine! Marijuana!), and it had been a while since something like this had happened; when I noticed the date a week or so ago I wondered what sort of school tragedy would be happening on 4/20. It just happened a little early this year.

[sabotabby]

I've never noticed the 4/20 connection. Is it coincidence, or do you think that psychotic types plan for it because that's when other people have gone on rampages?

[elgordochico.livejournal.com]

I read almost everything I could get ahold of. The reason I didn't blog about is because of my hardboiled credo on life: "Be a precious flower. But keep it inside. Keep it inside. Keep it...inside."

Feelings aside, I kept thinking about how many people die like this in a senseless hail of violence everyday in Iraq and everywhere else. Yesterday four people were killed here in Gotham, and the shooter then shot himself. Despite the similarities to VA Tech incident, it was a blip on the newsradar, and no one in the national media made a connection to how often this happens. I guess they were afraid to trivialize the tragedy by drawing our attention away.

The more I think about it the more I realize that the newsmedia makes a fetish out of grief. They don't focus on important stuff; they focus on "feelings." They hunt on the grief of survivors like emotional vultures. They are sending a signal to everyone to be ready to say something about their feelings. It doesn't surprise me in the least that many of those feelings came bleeding out on LJ. But I dunno how much it helps you cope with grief to make a blog post. It probably makes things worse to talk feelings with strangers, who cannot do anything to help you cope with them.

Traditional news media, by treating this event as an isolated spasm of violence, makes things worse. Fact of the matter is, there were roughly 40 school shootings last year around the world. More than 30 took place in the US. What we need is anger, not sadness. Constructive emotion is anger. Sadness is almost always destructive.

But, then again, what do I know.

[sabotabby]

"Be a precious flower. But keep it inside. Keep it inside. Keep it...inside."

This is usually my intent. But it never works out that way.

I am in favour of constructive anger, myself. I alternate between hopeless depression and righteous indignation, interspersed with rare moments of joy. It's a hard way to be, though.

[erinlin.livejournal.com]

When I heard the shooter was Asian, I did a little mental rundown of all my friends and classmates who were Asian and thought "gee, I should watch out for them the next few days, in case some jerk tries something stupid."

I also felt a great surge of relief when I found out the shooter wasn't from the middle east.

I'm not sure how I feel about feeling like that; whether those were weird (or appropriate) reactions, but those were my first instincts.

[sabotabby]

I can't see there being much of a physical backlash against individuals, at least not as much as there would have been if the shooter was Middle Eastern. I think there's more likely to be grossness in the media about "model minority" stereotypes and this expectation that random Koreans should disassociate themselves from this guy. I've seen that happening already, and it is rage-inducing.

[jk-fabiani.livejournal.com]

This is just like a typical day in Baghdad.

Thirty slain is considered a good day.

[sabotabby]

True.

[stoneself.livejournal.com]

i was thinking... 32 at one time in rich school once in a great while v. one at a time in/around a poor school fairly often.

[sabotabby]

That hadn't occurred to me; shooting deaths here are relatively rare that every one of them makes the news. But in the U.S., definitely.

[king-felix.livejournal.com]

Did something else that, in hindsight, feels a bit strange

--I started laughing, it is usually what I do as a first response to any event like this.

My second response is I usually want to call one of my friends who I associate all evil with (Dave) and congratulate him on a job well done.

I hope the shooter wasn't [insert ethnicity here].

The opposite reaction, actually. Knowing that he was AZN, I immediately wished he was South Korean. I knew everyone in the world US was going to be an idiot over this case, I at least wanted to have some fun in conversation by claiming that Starcraft made him do it.

[sabotabby]

...what is Starcraft?

[sonjaaa.livejournal.com]

I think better awareness and treatment for mental health issues could have prevented it. Our society is in the midsts of a widely untreated and invisible mental health epidemic, and this is just one example of how it affects the lives of people andthose around thm

[sabotabby]

Though I also worry about the other extreme, which ends in kids who write depressing goth poetry getting needlessly drugged with Ritalin.

[misfitina.livejournal.com]

i couldn't answer #1 as i learned about it and went back to work.

[sabotabby]

This poll is highly skewed towards people with desk jobs. :(

[dobrovolets.livejournal.com]

I didn't immediately do it, but at one point after I heard about the shooting I loaded three of my old favorite Rock Albums of Adolescent Angst (Nirvana Nevermind, The Pixies Doolittle and Peter Murphy Deep) into my CD changer. School shootings always remind me of that time of life, in part because in high school I would fantasize about perpetrating one, and in part because the college I attended freshman year had had one the year before I got there, resulting in a peculiarly uptight environment for psychologically unstable brats like me.

[sabotabby]

I was terribly lucky that Columbine happened after I'd graduated high school. I wore a black trenchcoat practically every day.

[sadie-sabot.livejournal.com]

I looked at the news online a bit, but not that much. It's not a situation that I feel like I need to know all that much about; in fact when soemone in line at ocurt asked me this morning if I'd red his played I was sort of stunned at the idea that people were reading the plays.

Now, when New Orleans flooded I looked at the news non stop, cried non stop, etc. But, this, well, by the time I heard about it it was over, so there's not much more I need to know.

I've been kind of pissed off too, about how upset your average on the street american is about this and how little they could care aobut the daily death toll in Iraq. I mean, I've had over 5 conversation with strangers in line or on the train aobut the VTech shootings, but I couldn't tell you that last time I ahd a discussion with a stranger about the war in iraq, which i spend time thinking aobut daily. We're a sick,s elf scentered fucking society, you kow? augh,. just writing aobut it is pissing me off!!!




People watch too much tv. Do people really need to be hearing/seeing/reading aobut this incident 24/7 for DAYS???? for crying out loud. bleah. I'm gonna go shred some paper.

[sabotabby]

When New Orleans flooded, I refused to watch any TV or video or listen to the radio after a certain point. I limited myself to reading about it. For some reason, if I heard the voices of any of the victims, I would start crying. I cried a lot over the articles too, but it was easier to manage.

I'm not that pissed off at the man-in-the-street's priorities. I think it's common to empathize more with People Like Us than with complete strangers. Of course, the people getting killed daily in Iraq are People Like Us, but a hell of a lot of effort, conditioning, and propaganda goes into making sure that we don't realize that.

[jvmatucha.livejournal.com]

Why no one ever asks, "What is it that makes someone want to carpet bomb a middle eastern country?" Somehow that doesn't qualify as psychotic.

The gun control debate got re-ignited, and all of the pundits are saying that it's not the issue, that we "have to find out why this happens." Easy access to guns is part of it, but despite more than 60% of americans, including many gun owners, in favor of stricter gun laws, that won't happen because of the powerful gun lobby.

And pundits are only saying we need to "find out why this happens" to deflect the idea of stricter gun laws, that won't happen either, because instead of honestly trying to find out what made this individual's mind completely cave in on itself, they'll stand by self-righteous morality and say he was "evil" and "cowardly", and then they'll blame video games and rap music for it. And then we'll wait for the next James Hubeerty or DC sniper or disturbed individual to shoot up another school or McDonalds or whatnot.

[sabotabby]

Why no one ever asks, "What is it that makes someone want to carpet bomb a middle eastern country?" Somehow that doesn't qualify as psychotic.

Frustrated masculinity? Also, I know that Scooter Libby wrote some very disturbed fiction. And George Bush listens to that violent country music.

[frippy.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the plays were disturbing in the ways violence showed up in them, but what bothered me more about them on some level was that a guy about to graduate with an English degree wrote such crappy dialogue. If concluding your writing with acts of violence were enough make you a murderous psycho, Flannery O'Connor would have been locked up for life.

As some sort of solid evidence that this was coming, I think these plays are like that LJ guy people briefly thought belonged to the killer. He happened to have a comments-disabled post of him posing with some vintage guns he just bought, referred to his upcoming Masters program at VT as "hell," recently broke up with a girlfriend, and quoted Ann Coulter without irony -- it's too easy for people to look at these public artifacts after the fact and conclude, "It's so obvious what was happening here!"

(The non-killer's LJ made Drudge Report -- "He did it over a girlfriend!")

I hate the first 24 hours of news these days because there's so many bad leads and bad ideas and misinformation -- like the Mooninite attack on Boston. The first few hours of a big news story like this are only useful for making your crappy conspiracy theory documentary -- "These stunned witnesses said this while still scared shitless and confused about what the fuck was going on -- why did they change their stories later? Did the men in black visit them?"

[sabotabby]

My friend TAs Comparative Literature and thus I wasn't surprised at the appalling quality of the writing. Quote from him:

Student: I need an A on this paper to get into teachers college!
My friend: Your paper doesn't have any verbs in it.

I actually saw the non-killer's LJ within a few hours of reading about the shootings. It didn't occur to me, even with the guns, that he might be the shooter, though I wasn't surprised when other people came to that conclusion. I think the fact that he was apparently posting while the shooting was happening or shortly thereafter tipped me off.

[cpxbrex.livejournal.com]

I posted on my blog about how Jesus didn't really want us to have guns (http://blog.chrisbradleywriter.com/2007/04/bible-interpretation-example-luke-2236.html), but was non-committal on the issue of gun control, itself. For the record, here, I'm strongly gun control. It's stupid that 15,000 Americans every year die from gun violence just so a couple of nitwits in the NRA can feel macho. But at no point did I feel BAD about doing so. ;)

[cpxbrex.livejournal.com]

But about the actual item, itself. I don't distinguish between strangers dying in Virginia and strangers dying in Iraq or Sudan. I feel vaguely sad for them all, and I do as much as I feel capable of doing to stop and prevent such situations, but since for years I've been for criminalizing gun ownership it isn't like I can do anything special about it.

[queerasmoi.livejournal.com]

What crossed my mind (actually later when the shooter's identity came out) was: "I am positive that Margaret Cho has something timely, appropriate and respectfully witty to say, that it's on her blog already, and that it's more worth quoting than anything else I could have to say about the topic."

[sabotabby]

Of course, you were totally right. WWMCD?

[silmaril.livejournal.com]

The "something else": "I am not surprised at all. Why am I not surprised or shocked at all?"

Then the next day I tried to analyze that thought a little.

[sabotabby]

I really like that post.

[livingfossil.livejournal.com]

Yea, I don't own a TeeVee so my mom informed me about the shootings the morning it happened. I live in Richmond so many of the people I come into contact with are much closer to the tragedy that I or most other people are (most of the kids I work with know people at VATech). I can't really say that I a more sad today, yesterday, or whatever, on account of this tragedy; the world we live in is so fucked that this sort of violence shouldn't surprise us, and it doesn't me so much.

The gun control thing sort of tickled me when I saw some of it circling out from various centers in the blogosphere: it's one of those boxes people think in when they are confronted with a systemic ill.

I haven't commented on the shootings that much except to say that this tragedy is allowed to become a media-spectacle, while others on scales of magnitude far greater are not. Ah well: The world sings a song as it moves along, and it ain't in a major key.

[sabotabby]

I think a major cultural difference up here is that no one, when we hear of a shooting, automatically thinks, "more guns would have solved the situation." It seems counterintuitive from where I'm sitting.

[jhfurnish.livejournal.com]

blackcommentator.com had an interesting political cartoon about that. I'm going to post it on my LJ.

In the meantime, they have more than two of these in Iraq every day - and today there were like 185 killed or something like that in a single car-bombing incident.

But, as you say, we don't know them.

As Stalin said - and I know you know this quote - "One man's death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic."

[sabotabby]

Someone needs to make the photo that jk_fabiani just posted in his LJ more widely seen. But I don't think that gory photos will do it.

[robotar.livejournal.com]

I thought: "worst shooting in American history?" And so I went and looked up on statistics of the massacre of American Indians.

[sabotabby]

I thought it was "modern American history." Not that anyone ever counts indigenous people.