Get the hell over it!

The BBQ Pit
1

You know…

As much as I want to care, I find myself more interested at the utter stupidity shown by the media lately. Let’s consider a quote from a local news station tonight, for example

“With school starting for students around the country within days, it’s time to look back at the tragedy at Columbine and what we can do nowadays to prevent similar occurances in school.”

Today was day 1 of a 5 day expose`.

You know, I have all the sympathy in the world for the loved ones of the victimes of Columbine, Jonesboro, and the other school systems around the nation, but jesus christ… GET THE FUCK OVER IT ALREADY. My goal is not to offend the victims’ loved ones, but man… isn’t what most of these psycho kids were going for in the first place? Attention?

As a high school student, I find some of the shit said on the news to be belittling, if anything. “Everyone’s a potential suspect.” Uhm, no?. Get off my ass. If I’m not having a bad day, it doesn’t mean I’m going to shoot anyone. Must every day between September and June have some sort of “look back” at Columbine?

It takes a couple of bad apples to screw up the entire crop, but come ON. I won’t quote prior safety records held by my school or any other because they mean exactly jack shit. But for christ sake, “Everyone’s a potential suspect”? Schools have gone as far as removing bathroom doors and replacing them with fixed partitions to further safety precautions. If increased safety means decreased privacy… sigh.

Don’t get me wrong, now… I’m all for safety and caution… it’s just way overhyped in the media recently. Which isn’t a good thing, either. Watching the news story (quote: “Most incidents of aggression could’ve been prevented, researchers say, as the teens committing these acts of violence told their friends beforehand”), a friend of mine could only help notice “If I was going to commit an act of violence now, I’d thank the media for reminding me not to tell anyone.”

It’s nice that everyone wants us to be safe, but the fact is, 99.999% of students did not shoot their classmates last year.

2

This whole thing is Gore’s fault. If he had just won Florida, I don’t think we’d be having any more problems in the school.

3

We have a robust 1st Amendment and the right to free speech, but the near instantaneous broadcast of the latest tricks, tragedies, and techniques undoubtedly contribute to ‘more of the same’ by impressionable youth. I can’t begin to count the number of horrible practices of which I personally would never have thought up up on my own in a million years paraded across the television dial.

“Just how does one make a fertilizer bomb? We’ll find out when we return after the break.”

4

From time to time, I like to indulge my inner cynic, with the instructions that he should at least consult with some other interior genies to try to sound at least mildly entertaining to their landlord. And so my inner cynic has recently taken to picturing the media as “The Media”, a single creature. Sort of a giant Cthonian monstrosity existing in five dimensions, and the four-dimensional cross-sections of its tentacles simply happen to look like the people involved in the media from our limited viewpoint.

And (my inner cynic continues) The Media loves when things like Columbine happen. It gets a happy quiver all throughout its eldritch bulk when it first realizes that a couple extreme decimal-of-a-decimal-of-a-decimal-of-a-decimal…-a-decimal outlyers of the statistical breakdown of all schoolkids just randomly sprayed some bullets around and killed and injured some others. Its constituent extrusions into our plane get to put on their Frowny Serious Faces, and talk about the Great Tragedy, and engage in theme-and-variation for an excitingly long measure along its fourth dimensional axis.

In other words, you can have Colombine back when you pry it from its cold, dead-but-dreaming tendrils.

5

Damn, that was too good for the pit…

-Rav

6

Figured I was treading on ice far too thin to go anywhere else except GD, where I’m pretty sure it was discussed before.

7

Yeah, I really have to wonder about what the hell people are thinking when they treat kids in school the way they do. My pet peeve is the typical news story I read over and over, some kid gets killed in a random accident, and psychologists and counsellors are rushed in to help these kids with their “trauma.” Hell, when I was a kid, we had several deaths, drunk driving casualties, and one particularly horrible accident when a kid was sucked into a threshing machine and was torn to bits. And they never gave a single thought to giving anyone psychological counseling.
Are kids today so fragile that they need all this mollycoddling?

8

Drastic, you’ve obviously spent time in a newsroom on a slow news day. The sort where (and I have seen this) one of the journos will shout in frustration, “Oh for fuck’s sake, will somebody shoot someone and give us something to do?”

Tragedy rates, and if you play your cards right, you can get ratings out of one single incident for years. Depressing to realise it, but the concept of “news” as “telling people what actually happened” went the way of the dodo years ago.

9

you should move to colorado, we don’t hear much about columbine in respect for those gone. or maybe i just don’t watch enough tv. but i haven’t seen anything on it since the one-year anniversary, which was 6 months ago. i think that we don’t linger on it so much here because it’s different when the people you know are directly affected. you don’t need the media to remind you, because it’s always in the back of your mind anyway.