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

[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*.

[lokilokust.livejournal.com]

'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*.'
agreed.

[one-serious-cat.livejournal.com]

That's why "I blame the patriarchy" crossed my mind as I learned more about what had happened.

[peterbilt-47.livejournal.com]

There was an article somewhere recently about mass text-messaging software that's now available for precisely this kind of logistical planning- you can broadcast alerts about shit like incoming snowstorms, special parade circumstances, or mad gunmen, to whole constituencies at a keystroke, and get everyone in on the contingency plan right away.

It's only really in use in a couple of places right now, though, so I think VaTech can be excused for not having it handy.