"Here is my advice to America to avoid what happened to us. Don't think that it can't happen to you. We thought we were safe. It can happen to anybody."
This quote is from a member of HROC, a group working for peace in Rwanda and Burundi. That's not what this diary is about. But it reminded me of the issue I'm writing about today, the Virginia Tech massacre, because Americans always seem to think we are invincible. Nobody expected it. It hit home.
And perhaps that explains the media's infuriating response to the incident, which was to treat it like another "dead white girl story," with all of the details and few of the facts. Keep reading, and I'll explain why I think the Virginia Tech shootings should have been left as a community tragedy, not a national one.
When I got home on April 16, 2007, I turned on the news, and the coverage of Virginia Tech was nonstop. Granted, I turned on Fox first (which my family watches, despite being strongly liberal), but it was being shown everywhere. Photographs of the scene and the campus, new information coming in from minute to minute about survivors and identifying the killer, and microphones being poked in the faces of any bystander that Fox could find.
I turned on the news later, after the killer had been identified, and found that the microphones were now being thrust at his family and people who had known him, asking if they had ever suspected, what he had been like. Newscasters said over and over that it was a tragedy.
I wasn't entirely sure why, but I was utterly disgusted.
Here's the plain and simple fact of it. Virginia Tech is not important just because of the number of people that died. Hundreds of thousands of people die every day, due to starvation, illness, warfare, suicide, or sectarian violence. As a matter of fact, over eighty Americans die every day due to gun violence.
And yet, many news stations felt it necessary to spend hours on it, as a sob story. Not only does it demean the losses faced (you can tell it is demeaning because it made me able to argue guiltlessly about these tragic deaths; but I digress) but it also directs our attention to a single incident and a single issue, when there are many deaths and many problems all over the world. The way the issue was presented was also misleading - it's not quite an issue of gun control, but of mental health issues and enforcement of gun control in that context.
And most frighteningly, the media coverage of such events encourages future maniacs to do the same thing, to get attention. Seung-Hui Cho himself, as a picked-on high school student with a serious personality disorder, was transfixed by the Columbine shootings - and began fantasizing about homicide and suicide afterward. Every minute we spend talking about Cho on national television is another minute that a homicidal mental patient daydreams about how everyone will remember him afterward.
What makes the deaths of thirty American college students more important than all the other deaths in the world? Perhaps because it was so sudden. Perhaps because it was so many at once. Perhaps because it's close to home, and it hit a nerve. The world's not as much of a predictable place as we think it is, and it is our own college students that sometimes may face a risk - not just people in far-away places like Iraq and Rwanda. Is this why networks snapped up the story?
Maybe so. Maybe it's because, in this instance, trying to honor the victims is a balm to America's collective conscience. There is no one suggesting that we should avoid getting involved, as with Darfur, and no conflicting viewpoints. There is one right view, and it makes us feel better about our part in the world if we wear maroon, orange, and white today.
It's all well and good to mourn the victims of the Virginia Tech massacre. But please - and this isn't mere nihilism - let's not forget that there are serious issues with violence in the world, and while wearing the VA Tech colors is a nice gesture, it does not save anyone, nor does it change our treatment of mentally ill people who are a potential danger to themselves or others - nor does it improve a violent situation anywhere else in the world. Cho was a victim too. Our first questions about such an event should not be, "How horrible must the victims' parents be feeling?," but "What was the problem, and what can we do?"
That's just my two cents.
Peace.