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

[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.

[ltmurnau.livejournal.com]

A couple of one-act plays he wrote for a class were placed on a bulletin board system called Blackboard for peer review, and have been exhumed to the Internet by one of his former classmates. I don't have the link but it won't be hard to find.

Basically they are crap, full of puerile violence, and read as if they were written by an 8th grader who hasn't gotten bored with writing swear words yet.

They are being trotted out as evidence that he should have been pre-emptively locked up/ shot full of government-approved pharmaceuticals (never mind he was on antidepressants anyway)/ shot on sight/ deported to Korea, etc. etc..

So for once a whole subculture isn't being blamed for the actions of a deranged individual. [sarcasm]Though perhaps it's time the creative-writing crowd, that class of professional liars, came in for some overdue suspicion... look at them, making things up with impunity, writing and talking about things that never happened, making people upset, claiming it's all something called "fiction"... in the end, Americans don't trust a writer any more than they trust a reader.[/sarcasm]

[realcdaae.livejournal.com]

Ahhh, I thought it meant he'd been reading some particular plays and they were being pointed out as evidence that he was disturbed. I'd read something about his writings, but I definitely don't feel the need to go read any of them!

All horror writers should, of course, be locked away in mental hospitals. Along with anyone who produces a horror film. Look at that notorious serial killer Wes Craven, and Stephen King the mass murdering psychopath. Not to mention imfamous cannibal Thomas Harris, and that damn blood-sucking fiend Bram Stoker.