Thanks. Like I said, the odds are that he’s fine and his phone’s just tied up. (And yeah, I do mean Norris…even if I didn’t walk past it every other day for a year, you’d think I’d remember it from the 9,254 news articles I’ve read today. Still kinda mixed up, I guess.)
The tragedy of the people in Virginia is just that - it’s tragic. It’s always tragic when somebody is murdered.
But the net tragedy level of the world isn’t even raised an entire percentage point.
After reading the link upthread, I realized that well, I just can’t bring myself to tears about the people outside my monkeysphere. Hell, I can’t bring myself to tears about the people inside my monkeysphere sometimes.
Some people are intrinsicly more vulnerable to PTSD than others, I think. It’s not a character defect: some people might inherit high cholesterol or a tendency toward breast cancer, but Uncle Charlie can smoke a carton a week and die at 95 in his sleep.
I empathize because I am a teacher and a human being. This puts students of all sorts in my Monkey Sphere. I care because I am a firm believer in the Second Amendment and this is going to spin way out of control before too long.
I would think, no, I hope, that it’s human nature to feel shock and sorrow at a horrific act, and for the suffering of others.
It’s affecting me because the news footage and cellphone camera videos are eerily similar to what we saw on TV after the Dawson College shooting in Montreal, where several of my friends were studying at the time (I had graduated the semester before). It reminded me of how stressful it was, waiting to hear from people I knew were at school that day, hoping everyone was all right, worrying when they didn’t answer their cell phones for hours. I know there are hundreds of people going through that today too, and I feel for them.
I’m not in tears about it, but it’s upsetting me enough that I can’t watch the news footage. I’ll read the news online, but I can’t watch it on TV.
For me it starts with the randomness. I imagine the daily routine being interrupted like this. Then I’m overcome with sadness and grief for the friends and family of the victims, as I extend out the rest of the day in my mind. Then, something else pops up in my mind wondering if things could have been different.
I wonder why do people just hide, run away, or give up completely when faced with these situations? I think how many tragedies might have been lessened or stopped if just a few people were willing to risk themselves to save everyone else. I can’t imagine a classroom full of people just sitting there while a lunatic shoots them one by one. On 9/11, I couldn’t imagine people letting those guys take over the plane with knives. I can’t imagine people on a LIRR train watch a guy shooting sleeping people, reloading and shooting some more and not acting to stop it.
I start to think about how I’d act in a similar situation. I’d like to think that I’d keep my cool, and go down fighting, and maybe in the process of dying I’d distract the gunman enough for someone to smash his head with something heavy. Hopefully I won’t have to find out, because most likely I’d just panic like everyone else.
Then I wonder, what if everyone was prepared to defend themselves? If kids grew up being taught how to fight, if most people were armed and trained to use it, if we weren’t so afraid of just surviving ourselves that we wouldn’t intervene to save others. No, that would never work…
Finally, I accept that my safety and survival is not guaranteed in a world where bad things can and will happen. I decide to continue just doing what I do, doing my best to be a good person and taking the good out of life where I find it. Taking care of those around me that I care about.
I admit that these things don’t affect me emotionally all that much. Even 9/11 didn’t really affect me. It’s not that I don’t care it’s just that I don’t feel it as being real. It seems remote and removed from me. I recognize it intellectually as a tragedy but I don’t have any emotional response to it. It would be different if I knew any of the victims. I suspect a lot of people feel the same way but are reluctant to admit it for fear of being perceived as callous. I don’t think it’s callous. I think the anonymity and distance of the victims just tends to mute the empathic response.
I concur with Autolycus. Dinsdale, the experience is simply outside of your sphere. Yet, it could have easily happened to you or a loved one of yours. I served in Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf campaign. Although I’m no stranger to the destructive potential and lethality of civilian and military weaponry, it continues to amaze me how much pain and anguish one may inflict upon another just by pulling the trigger of a weapon. I support our constitutional right to bear arms, but I’m reminded of the scene in Clint Eastwood’s masterpiece “Unforgiven” when the Scofield Kid is remorseful after killing Quick Mike in the shithouse. The Kid remarks: “I can’t believe he’ll never breathe again, all because of pulling a trigger.” Eastwood’s character Will replies: “It’s a hard thing taken a man’s life. You take away everything he’s ever had or gonna be”. The Kid replies: “We’ll I guess he had it coming.” To which Will replies: We’ve all got it coming Kid". We’ve all got it coming Dinsdale. Let’s just hope it doesn’t come to us, or one of our loved ones, as it did to those unfortunate individuals at VA Tech. You might want to think about this sordid event from that perspective. You might then be able to have more empathy for the plight of those who have been killed and injured.
I’ll probably be able to muster up some genuine feeling when the victims become more than part of a number. 32 dead. That’s too abstract. Who were they? When I see photos and learn something about them, it’ll be more real.
I’m glad not to be the only one who thought about perspective, Rwanda and Iraq especially. What does living with constant horror and tragedy do to a society?
I was in in an Engineering class at 8:30 this morning at a large University. A bit of “but for the grace of God go we”, which makes me care more than, say, if it happened at an office building.
I care because I feel a natural sympathy for the people who were killed or wounded and their families, but more to the point I find myself thinking about the position they were in. It’s extraordinarily unlikely that I will be put into that position at any time, but everybody thinks that before it happens to them. As a college student, I have a natural wariness about events of this nature. College is a fairly high-pressure environment, especially at this time of the year, and truthfully the only thing that surprises me is that this sort of thing doesn’t happen more often. There are a lot of people that come unglued when they have projects and papers due in a short period of time.
Iraq has a Virginia Tech shooting, or its equivalent, one, two, three times a day, sometimes more. In a country one-twelfth the population of the U.S.
Makes you wonder how some people live with themselves, but that’s another question.
I empathize with the parents and friends. I think of what the kids might have become. And I weep for society, which seems to be coming apart at the seams more and more each year.
I work at a university, in a science building. Like most universities, we have students who are under lots of pressure to succeed and are always on edge, students who are suffering from mental illness and social disorders, and students who just plain off their rocker. Sometimes I worry–probably irrationally–about all the ticking time bombs around me.
I went to an engineering school. There were many times when I fantasized about bombing specific buildings (with key people inside), because they represented failure and loneliness to me. And I just wanted to die.
I feel sad whenever death is random and freaky. A person makes dinner plans while they’re brushing their teeth in the morning, not knowing they aren’t going to be there to eat it. A person steps into a classroom not knowing they’ll never leave it. We all engage in perfunctory tasks like these, and our minds are never on our impeding mortality. Death doesn’t scare me too much, but I’d like to know when it’s coming. I guess, so I can tell people I love them, take one final glance at the sun and the clouds, and then brace myself for the exit.
The idea that these particular people didn’t know makes me sad.
But I feel more sorry about the parents. They didn’t know either. Whenever something like this happens, I think of my own parents and how horrible it feels to have offspring to worry about all the time.
“No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
I guess I don’t understand, given that more civilians are dying senseless deaths every day in Iraq, that I am supposed to feel more sad about what happened in Virginia. Why? Because we happened to be born in the same country?
I’m surprised no one at Ga Tech has snapped like this. All the right ingredients are there. Stress. Competition. Loneliness. Depression. An imbalance of males to females. A lot of socially inept people.
It’s scary when you think about.
Death is tragic all around, totally. But we expect people to die in war-torn countries. We don’t expect them to die when they are sitting in a classroom.
I don’t know how it feels to be in Iraq or in a war, so my ability to empathize is less when I hear about deaths there. But I do know how it feels to be a student and a young person who thinks they’re going to live forever.
It’s not something you can rationalize.
I’ve been on that campus, I work in a college, I’ve seen parents who had to come to colleges to claim the bodies of kids who died from DUI or other senseless deaths, the knowledge that hundreds if not thousands of people will be devastated by the completely fucking senseless death of kids who had their lives to look forward to and who last night were fretting about mid-terms or whatever. I’ve been close to people killed by senseless violence or totally avoidable car wrecks, it’s always a reminder of just how random our own lives are and how those we love most could be ended instantly because they left home a minute later than expected and thus had to stop for a redlight and got hit by an asshole who drank too much they would have avoided if they’d left a minute sooner or a minute later. The knowledge that 32 body bags are going to be taken out of that building and 32 funerals and coffins and graves will have to be arranged, which I translate to 32 students at the college where I now work and all of them dead for no fucking reason whatever other than some guys majorly fucked up brain chemistry.
Then there’s the knowledge of the media circus we’re all going to have to endure. By this time tomorrow we’re going to be seeing interviews with the as yet unidentified Asian-American’s high school teacher and next door neighbor and former roommate and second cousin and there’s going to be “experts” of all ilks braying about the senselessness and making some fucking morality tale and Dr. Phil is going to be using it to promote “healing” (which is to say “promote Dr. Phil”) and Larry King’s going to be ejaculating blood from spanking it so hard knowing that this one is good for an easy 14 shows and Anderson Cooper and Nancy Grace and every other fucking overpaid talking head will be pretending to give a shit FOR WEEKS AND WEEKS. The funerals are going to be shown on TV like it was a celebrity wedding, crying relatives are going to have cameras stuck in their face by blow-dried reporters looking as solemn and sympathetic as possible in just the right lighting, Bush and other politicians are going to come on TV and tell us “senseless violence is bad, m’kay!”, sermons across America are going to be preached on the issue with absolutely no positive outcome and a year from now when 32 young people who should have been getting ready for graduation or summer break are instead decomposing in $5000 boxes 6 feet under the ground the whole media crocodilopolis circle jerk is going to start again with “The Virginia State Massacre: One Year Later” and absolutely no good whatsoever can possibly come from it except some media whores get more exposure they can work into huge ratings and $30 million contracts, moralists can go on and on as if somehow morality was a factor. Some fuckhead “doesn’t matter” personality’s going to make an insensitive joke or comment that will cause some auto da fa of the Usual Suspects all coming in to take the controversial stand “You shouldn’t joke about innocent people who died violently”. Some fuckhead political whore like Coulter or Moore is going to somehow blame it on anything from Bush to gay marriage to drug policies and cause an outrage among supporters and detractors, liberals are going to use it to attack conservatives and conservatives to attack liberals on everything from gun control issues to college lifestyles, some victim will have a family member who in trying to grab onto anything that looks like it might make some good of it will seize the edge of a blade on some social issue that they’re passionate but uninformed about and…
all the while a new mass murderer is elevated to the condemned but perversely celebrated video rosaries and catechisms along with other beloved villains from Dahmer to Oswald, their victims will be forgotten other than there were 32 of them, and 20 years from now an old woman will still occasionally smell a scent that reminds her of the daughter who should be 40 and married with kids and a career but instead decomposed years before for absolutely no fucking reason whatsoever. There are 32 dead kids who will be taken out of that building in body bags for no reason.
I do not believe in an afterlife. I do not believe in divine justice. A fucked up piece of shit killed 32 people more deserving of life than he was and he got away with it, the only punishment being he no longer exists either and that was something that could have happened this morning at 6:00 a.m. and spared 31 other students. And while they rot careers and opportunities will be made of their senseless deaths, and I’m again reminded that Anne Frank died covered in shit and lice in the hellholes of Bergen-Belsen’s evacuees while the men who held guns on her family and forced them into the cattle cars got away with it, and while her Diary is a great testament to her life I’d far rather her be unknown altogether and not currently on anybody’s mind except perhaps the mind of an annoyed gay Hispanic bartender in Boca Raton who smiles and pretends to care while barely listening to the old Jewish woman nursing daiquiris blather on about her dead husband and why she likes Boca better than Miami and about her goddamned grandson the lawyer and some shit about the time she and her family hid in an attic and there’s nothing I can do it to fix that.
This makes absolutely no sense but I’ll submit reply anyway. My ultimate point is that there is untold suffering for absolutely no conceivable purpose and I can’t fix it.