Ray in New Orleans

Right there waith ya ray.

"sad. shrug. whatever."

It regsters in an abstract way. I don't know if it's daily death-tolls from iraq or tragedy over-load after too many tsunamis and shootings and hurricanes and buildings going down.

And it doesn't even bother me.

I know exactly what you mean, Ray. I don't have a clue why, other than outrage fatigue, and I'm trying to find some sense of compassion, but all I feel is dead.

It's not about Koreans, or white people or black people. It's about masculinity run rampant.
There is nothing intrinsic to Blacksburg that makes it a magnet for violent rampages. The sad thing is, the vulnerability is everywhere. I recommend reading a book called Violence by James Gilligan to better understand the reasons we live in a society awash in testosterone-fueled mayhem. It's got to stop.

Actually I think yours is probably the healthiest response. Not every one of us is responsible for discerning the "underlying truth" revealed in any given tragic event.

The thing is what it is.. a very bad thing that happened. All over the country, people who feel like it is their job or worse their moral imperative to plug this into some social pattern of causality or to assign some blame to the school.. or make it a cause celeb for gun control or increased public surveillance or low-fat ice cream or whatever are really doing the people involved in the event and the rest of us for that matter an obscene disservice.

It's just a bad thing that happened. Bad and good things happen all of the time.. the majority of which do not involve you. You aren't responsible for doing, or saying or even feeling anything.

I'm sorry innocent people died but, frankly, my eyes were on the fire in central city this morning. I do feel a bit uneasy that I don't particularly feel anything about it. It pisses us off that the rest of the country is apathetic to our plight and here we are feeling the same apathy.

It's not apathy though. I think everyone agrees that it's horrible and everyone probably feels sorry for the families of the victims. It's just not necessary to write or say or do something profound in response. In fact.. it's more than a bit self-centered to do so.

I'm kicking around the idea of starting a new blog called "Oh, for fuck's sake".

I agree with Jeffrey to some extent. My response to the Blacksburg shootings means nothing outside of expressions of emotion (emotions which, as my original post points out, I am not feeling). Apathy towards the situation in New Orleans is different, since continued apathy and inaction is actually prolonging the suffering here.

There is nothing to "fix" in Blacksburg. A bad thing happened, and it's sad. There is plenty to fix down here, but there is a lack of will and/or competence amongst the powers-that-be to fix it, and so more people suffer and struggle and even die as a result.

I'm having a similar response to the whole thing. I mean, obviously it's tragic, and it's awful, and all that jazz. But mostly I've been fascinated and vaguely disgusted by watching the media go through its reflexive checklist of "how to cover tragedies."


We've got:


- The "find someone/something to blame" responses (parents / culture / heritage / video games / society / faculty / police -- god forbid we just acknowledge that sometimes monsters bubble up out of the gene pool, and it's not anyone's fault, because then we couldn't feel safe).


- The information saturation responses (the minutest fragments of information are presented, continually, because the presence of detail makes people think they understand things more than they do).


- The continual parade of talking heads offering canned opinions (so you can pick one and go with it, rather than having to think for yourself).


- The humanization and personalization of the story (backstories of the victims, history of the killer, eyewitness accounts of those who barely escaped, cell phone video and camera footage of the events as they occurred, and so on, so people who were in no way connected to or affected by these events can vicariously experience them in order to feed their emotional reponses)


- The lionization of selected members of the fallen (stories of the heroic actions taken by specific people who died so we can get that cliche warm fuzzy feeling about how adversity can sometimes bring out the best in people)


- The race by every single person with any sort of public visibility to be the first to offer their thoughts/hopes/prayers to the victims and their friends and families (mustn't appear distant or aloof, and one can't pass up an opportunity to tweak one's public image when it comes along, of course...). For example, there were THREE "thoughts and prayers" mentions during American Idol last night alone. And you just know the contestants were trying to figure out if they had enough time to reherase a different song that would resonate with people in the Aftermath of This Tragedy....


- Political responses by figureheads who claim that by adhering to their policies you can ensure this doesn't happen to you


And so on. It's all such predictably manufactured response. The media making bank off the currency of fear by applying an illusion of safety, all so you can go back to feeling like this could never happen to you, really. That's our media culture in a fuckin' nutshell.

Very interesting discussion, y'all. I wonder if there are any parents of college students here (I know we have at least one "perfesser"). I don't doubt a lack of feeling has something to do with emotion overload from living in and through your own personal disasters and I completely agree with the repulsiveness of some aspects of the media coverage, particularly Gregg P.'s inciteful comments (there was a big ewww factor to Edwards jumping in so fast, IMHO). That said, I know three students (one who was locked down in the engineering building) and one professor at VT and have felt fully emotionally engaged.

thanks sophmom.

from the vantage of at least one perfesser, my favorite colleage has gotten actual death threats (yes, plural) from students who didn't like their grades. yeah, i'm fully emotionally engaged too. i'm not listening to the news... not because of the idiotic coverage, but because the thought of losing one of my wonderful colleagues, or any of my wonderful students makes my chest hurt. (not that it doesn't already hurt from thinking about the people in virginia who died.)

i also can't listen because it reminds me of 1989.

in 1989 a gunman walked into the engineering department at the Montreal Ecole Polytechnique, separated the men from the women, and opened fire on the women, stating something like the women were studying engineering, were therefore feminists, and he hated feminists. thinking of the women who died there, who would now be about my age, makes me want to sit down, put my head in my hands, and cry.

Eh. I got scholarship money to VT, might have gone there if it wasn't in such a small town. My mom was kinda freaking out a little about that.

As it goes, I found out one of my old crowd in college committed suicide earlier this week, so I could care less...

Reading back on my comment (left late last night - or at least late for my pathetic ass), I'm wondering if "incite" was a Freudian slip.

I just know the twists and turns of choosing a college. In fact, I know how close our friend who was locked down came to going to GA Tech, and how close he came to transfering to GT after his sophomore year. I'm betting that the RA killed in the early shooting went through a similar decision making process, being from GA and can almost imagine their concern for his safety, as our Tech's campus is in downtown Atlanta. Of course, all of this is in my hyper imagination.

Thanks for the support, Sarah. I'm sure this brings back bad memories for a number of folks (the Columbine survivors immediately came to my mind) and Candice, I'm so sorry. That's so sad.

Ray I've been wondering why I don't feel "more" myself. I think I am just numb from news overload in general. Everything is blown so out of proportion (anna nicole?) that when something "real" happens, it is very difficult to process it in a meaningful way.