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

[fun-drive.livejournal.com]

This was just a shocking event that the media keeps on playing because it was that shocking and because they got his press release.

[99catsaway.livejournal.com]

-It's not so much that I thought, "this is a typical day in Baghdad," in so many words. It was more like, I thought of the scope of this, versus other things. We've just read an article by a guy named Cass Sunstein on how people misinterpret risks to the point where the whole D.C. area was afraid of a sniper who killed 10 people, but millions upon millions of Americans won't modify their diets to avoid something that has an exponentially higher likelihood of killing them: heart disease. I would never want to minimize people's deaths, and I was sad when the brother of one of the victims talked on the Today Show. At the same time, the scope of this tragedy is small, comparatively.

-I only read a few pages of one play. It was so poorly written, I gave up and read the end.

-Re: question number one- I really didn't modify my behavior too much. I usually refresh internet news sites, so that was nothing unusual. :)

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

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

your second poll item captured nearly all of my thoughts, except for:

1. "damn; that sucks", which is about as sad as i got for the poor people shot. yes, i am cold. if i don't know somebody who died, or know somebody well who is directly affected in a major way, i have just a "mildly sad for a couple of minutes" response to tragedy. i foster that within myself, because when i let myself get more affected i have to stop reading news, since there is no limit to mankind's inhumanity. 33 dead is really a small blip on the radar; that's a GOOD day in baghdad (where i know more people than i know at VT). since my coldness doesn't make me go out and kill people, i consider it a useful coping strategy, but i tend to be quiet about it in my LJ so as to not tread on more sensitive people's feelings.

2. "here we'll go again with the mass vicarious grief". i need to develop a better coping strategy for that because it pisses me off too much when i see people clamour for increasing their kevin bacon number in regard to a tragedy that in fact doesn't touch them directly at all.

i was hoping the shooter was a "normal" white middle-class american and if not, that he was at least not a muslim, and not a weird-clothes-wearing, videogame-playing geek. i am a bit sorry that he turns out to have been south korean; anything that makes americans easily able to "other" him isn't good.

[terry-terrible.livejournal.com]

I choose "media blackout" thing though that isn't completely accurate. When something like this happens, it usually follows a pattern. The first stage is when the iccident happens or shortly after it when not all the fact are known to the media. After that there is what I call a "media orgy" stage where they endlessly report about the victims biographies, the biography or the shooter ad ad nasium, covering the mourning ceremonies and basically constantly rehashing the same facts over and over again to point of sensationalism.

I generally obcessively watch the news or try to find out information I can about it. But after it's done and over, I try to tune it all out since I find the new coverage exploitive and not really that authentically empathetic* as they claim to be.

I did it during Columbine, 9/11**, The Iraqi War etc.

I'm particularly upset that this kind of thing distracts the nation and is on everyone's thats but stuff like this gets a sidebar on page 11a of a newspaper:

From Juan Cole's blog on 2/26/07:

A suicide bomber with a bomb belt got into the lobby of the School of Administration and Economy of Mustansiriya University in Baghdad and managed to set it off despite being spotted at the last minute by university security guards. The blast killed 41 and wounded a similar number according to late reports, with body parts everywhere and big pools of blood in the foyer as students were shredded by the high explosives.

I doubt many Americans cared much about that.

*One of the first in-house jokes I learned in Journalism school was "If it bleeds it leads".

**By the second day I was actually joking about with my dorm roomate (who was chronically cynical as I was), I often do that in reaction to tragdies though I if it's to distance myself from trauma or if I'm just sick in that sort of way.

[ironed_orchid]

My first thought was pretty offensive, so I refrained from blogging about it, or pretty much at all this week.

But because you ask, I will share here...

On reading some headline about it being the 'worst massacre eva!' which translated as the largest number of dead and wounded who were shot by one person in the US, the thought that immediately crossed my mind was that we (Australia) still have the world record.

I felt pretty bad about that. But it was the first thing I thought. And then when gun control rants started, I thought about how even with much stricter gun control than the US, we still had the world record, so that it doesn't seem to make much difference with regard to homicidal killing sprees. (Although it would no doubt make a lot of difference to other types of death by shooting.)

[esizzle.livejournal.com]

I don't wanna read the guy's plays. Although I'm really curious but the shooter is an English major and he would probably be happy to know that people are reading his work. I heard it sucked anyway.

NA

[grimreaperess.livejournal.com]

I can't really fill out the poll, none really apply to me.

First off I agree with what you're observing, but the difference is not many LJers are likely to die of starvation, however they can see themselves potentially in danger of finding themselves in a shoot-up situation. That's what I think anyway.


I didn't hear about it when it happened, ironed_orchid mentioned it, then said something about Australia still having the record despite our gun control (although our gun control on semi-autos was a response to that particular shooting).

I saw a few news items about it on TV and my usual news sites. I had a quick discussion with adamthebastard who informed me that it could have happened in Australia as the guy had bought the gun at a gun shop and got a license and all that which is possible here. We were both unclear on the kinds of guns you can have in Australia though. I made the comment that the pro-gun people said it could have been prevented if there were more guns on campus, adamthebastard told me the story behind that and I shrugged and maintained my position that more guns aren't the answer to a gun problem.


It's not really a head-in-the-sand thing or a 'it will never happen to me' thing but it's very much an 'it happened in America' thing.

I'm feeling a little snarky that we're going to be hearing details about it for weeks when there are lots of other things happening right now.

[human-loser.livejournal.com]

I just read the plays. They're just bad plays. They don't tell you anything, except that he was trying to be shocking, and I guess that they don't teach story structure at VTech. But it's certainly not a glimpse into the mind of a killer. Way better adjusted folk (including myself) have written way worse.

[andreazenith.livejournal.com]

In my defense, I've been doing really shitty the last week or so.

This event *barely* crossed my mental/emotional radar. I just found out about it yesterday?

=O.o=

[gillen.livejournal.com]

Meh. Was mildly amused to see the shooter was South Korean, so I could argue this shooting was the product of both poorly designed domestic policy going back to 1789 and disastrous foreign policy going back to Harry Truman.

[lopukhov.livejournal.com]

I'll give you something to be cynical about: The day after, a white guy I know at the school made some racist crack about Koreans to my Korean friend. I told her the next time some whitey talks shit about Koreans, she should tell [that person] that when a couple of white kids shot down a bunch of people in Littleton, nobody ran around beating up white people, saying they're omg dangerous.

[homewardangel.livejournal.com]

i was watching a bunch of different networks. i was pleasantly surprised to see one commentator say very early on that taking funding from research to turn campuses into prisons was a remarkably stupid move.

later, i was revolted by a particular student journalist from the school who on national news was so plainly excited to be on tv and so clearly seemed to be Big Break!

[troubleinchina.livejournal.com]

I didn't know how to answer the first question. I really only picked up about what had happened due to blogs I read. I don't have a t.v. and I get my news through podcasts of the BBC (when I remember to upload them to my IPod before work), which is a good 24 hours behind. I didn't go out of my way to avoid it, but I didn't go out of my way to find out more, either. I've had a few discussions about it, but they've mostly been about the media responses.

The inappropriate jokes thing is my forte. I am *so* going to hell. Quickly. No collecting 200$ for me.

Last night we (me and my Aussie friend) were on a Ghost Tour that had a bunch of American students on it. Since we'd been talking earlier in the evening about the reaction of "Those lazy students didn't do enough to stop it, being all liberal-edumacated" (I'm sure you've read it), and my friend was really dreading spending the evening on a ghost tour with a bunch of American students, she was like "I could kill them all. That would end our torment" "Yeah, and I'm assured that American students can't handle a gunman anyway." We both giggled like idiots, and then she got all pouty because she hadn't thought of that first.

I always think I should feel bad about my sense of humour. At least I've gotten to the point where I can sort out where inappropriate places for it are.