I have been trying very hard to think of something to write on any subject other than the recent deadly violence at Virginia Tech in the United States. Perhaps not surprisingly, though, I haven’t been able to avoid the subject; it feels inappropriate to me to try to write something light and humourous in the context of these events. So let’s talk about the elephant in the room.
Like many people I know, I am one of those “can’t get enoughers” as far as the coverage of such incidents goes; it just so happens that I am on a week’s vacation right now, so I’ve had the opportunity to watch much of the network news coverage of these tragic events over the last couple of days. There have been the predictable themes throughout the coverage: installment number 6,798,256 in the gun control debate argument finger-pointing, chest-poking ideology fest; shrill warnings about the violent potential of those who include depictions of violence in their writing; a lot of what appears to me to be knee-jerk and factually unwarranted blame-game stuff, assigning fault to university and police officials for failing to prevent the actions of an isolated lunatic.
When events like this occur, I am always reminded of a conversation I had with my friend Dave one time. We were talking about the horrific incident du jour and he ranted for a little while about how the news reports about these things almost invariably make reference to a “senseless tragedy”, pointing out that it was unlikely we would respond to such news by saying, “Well, I’m glad it worked out that way, that’s exactly as it should be.”
I am struggling hard to find my own meaning, but I think what I’m trying to say is that we are so often unable to accurately express our human reaction to such sorrows; it is difficult to express grief without sounding maudlin, to express wisdom without being pedantic, and to give comfort where none exists. I never know what to say to a friend or acquaintance who has suffered the loss of a parent – how can we possibly know how to react when the grief goes from private to public?
I don’t want to make the mistake of dramatically over-simplifying the complicated circumstances of this incident in order to “deduce” some larger proposition about society; such propositions are generally questionable in terms of logic and they are not infrequently novel to neither their reader nor their author. They reek of a clumsy attempt to turn shared public grief into a commodity suitable for selfish (and pre-existing) political purposes. Any such commodification of grief is a disservice to the dead and wounded and their families.
Yet the human mind inexorably strains to force order upon the chaos it perceives; confronted with shocking information like the news of the shootings, we struggle to force the new knowledge to fit into the boxes that are already neatly arranged in our minds. Thus must every person come to terms with such news by explaining it to him or herself in terms that make sense according to their personal belief systems. In the geography of my mind, therefore, there is room for part of this story in a box labeled “what incidents like this can teach us about a culture that places so much emphasis on violence as the way to resolve our interpersonal problems”. I also have to pack some of the bits of this story away in the boxes reserved for information related to our collective and societal failure to provide adequate support systems and mechanisms to deal with mentally ill people in crisis.
Those are my boxes. What are yours?