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

[lopukhov.livejournal.com]

I knew I could count on word of mouth to tell me the news. I actually found out from me mum, and decided to not follow-up on it. I thought it was a crazy whitey, I hoped it wasn't an Arab/Indian/terrorist-looking person. The next day, a classmate that went to VA Tech came in with a VA Tech sweatshirt. I always wondered what that meant when people do that. when the flood hit Jakarta, when the tsunami hit Aceh, I didn't walk around with an Indonesian flag across my chest. Maybe I'm the kind of person who doesn't like the attention or sympathy or pity.

I avoided public places for a little. I walked home really late one night some time ago, and I was afraid there was a sniper hiding in the woods around the apartment complex. Being in the Home of the Brave has turned me into a mild paranoid, and the last thing a paranoid needs is to entertain the thought she might not be safe outside her home.

[sabotabby]

I made the mistake of reading the Encyclopedia Dramatica entry on the shooting.

People just don't understand the difference between tasteless humour and racism anymore. *sigh* Also, the ribbons were a bit much. There wasn't a tsunami ribbon, was there?

[lopukhov.livejournal.com]

And what colour would a Tsunami Ribbon be?

Oh em gee, you just gave me the greatest idea...