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

[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]

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?

[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.

[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.

[sabotabby]

True.

[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.

[sabotabby]

...what is Starcraft?

[jk-fabiani.livejournal.com]

Its impossible for anyone living in this part of the world to comprehend. I'm pretty sure of that...

[jk-fabiani.livejournal.com]

My inappropriate thought, "No war but the class war".

[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

[florence-craye.livejournal.com]

Good point.

[misfitina.livejournal.com]

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

[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.

[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]

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

[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]

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

[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?"

[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. ;)

[king-felix.livejournal.com]

StarCraft.

An article from The Korean Times on StarCraft.

[sabotabby]

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

[caprinus.livejournal.com]

It's like Warcraft in space. You and the computer/other humans command armies of beasties shooting at each other while prospecting for resources and building structures, basically. It's not even a First Person Shooter!

[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.

[king-felix.livejournal.com]

Maybe I should explain... Usually when the person who snaps played video games, they find games like DOOM and GTA to point fingers at, partly because it's just so obvious. The StarCraft thing is me both playing to racist notions (it's popular in the country of origin, so he must have loved it!) and also being a dick about making direct claims of influence. StarCraft just isn't the kind of game that most people would traditionally associate with influencing a spree.

I mean, seriously, it looks like this:



Although, it'll be even better when we get the first killer who compulsively played The Sims.

[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.