and I'm not Columbine either.
With all due respect to recent Diary authors..I'm not going to pass off this recent incident by saying "I'm one of you..I feel". Give me a break. Like I would know what it felt like to try to brace a damn desk against a door while a madman is trying to get in.
I can sit from the comfort of my upper-class home and wonder what it will be like to walk by those buildings this week..but do I know?? Will I really feel their reality? No.
I've sponsored and worked events to raise funds for breast cancer research. If I ever was so presumptious as to tell a survivor that I'm "one" of you I would hope she would slap me. I can recognize the battle, admire their ability to fight and work for better results..but to really be one of them..not so much.
Sometimes I think this "I'm one of you" approach is a nice comfortable way of insulating ourselves from the issues others deal with and the underlying issues of a given situation. I can "be" a Hokie and simply wrap myself in that grief instead of going "What the hell is going on with gun control, etc., etc.?". How much easier to tag along with someone's real grief than think about the reality of the experience.
I'm not a Hokie..not Columbine..and each DAY..every DAY, reading about the death tolls EVERY DAY, I thank goodness I'm not an Iraqi.
From the USA Today Editorial Board:
... The Virginia Tech shooting and its emotional aftermath help open a window into the pain of the ongoing slaughter in Iraq. The scale is far, far different. The numbers from Iraq are jaw-dropping. Thirty three deaths can mark a good day in Iraq. On an average day, three times that number are murdered.
That's a country a fraction our size. Adjusted for population, it is the equivalent of nearly 40 Virginia Tech massacres. Every day. Many Iraqis are kidnapped. Bodies show up in ditches with signs of torture, including drilling to the head. Patients are executed in hospitals. Many Iraqis simply disappear. About 90,000 a month are fleeing their homes. In the USA, the comparable number would be one million. The violence has reached into, and traumatized, every Iraqi family.
The point of this is not to trivialize the tragedy at Virginia Tech, which is wrenching, but to expose the enormity of the problem in Iraq and how disproportional it is to the American political debate.