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

[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.

[sadie-sabot.livejournal.com]

yeah, actually i guess I'm more pissed at the media, I mean, if people saw the iamges of the people killed in Iraq, heard about their familiesw, their musical tastes, etc, like they are about the VTEch vicitims, theymight give more of a shit.

And being mad at the media is such a diffuse kind of thing, you know?