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

[hopita.livejournal.com]

Here's what Wikipedia has to say about it. There was the 1985 ATF Siege and Columbine. It was Hitler's birthday (and, for what it's worth, it's apparently Crispin Glover's birthday as well. And then of course there's the whole weed thing. Apparently The Oklahomka City Bombing and Waco both happened on April 19th. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris mentioned both Oklahomka City and Waco as motivations for Columbine.

[hopita.livejournal.com]

I apparently missed one of the "bold" tags, but it took forever to do all of those links, so I'm gonna just say "feh."

[ironed_orchid]

It's also the day Jimmy Carter was attacked by a rabbit.

OK, I just got that by scrolling through the events on wiki.

[sabotabby]

I didn't know that Jimmy Carter was attacked by a rabbit.

I didn't know that rabbits could swim.

I am so much happier now that I know these two facts.

[ironed_orchid]

I learned this from an XKCD comic.

[hopita.livejournal.com]

I noticed that too.