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I found this entry on OKCupid. I hadn't heard this particular take on things before and I found it fascinating:
I'd been mulling over this for the past couple of days before I posted it on lj this morning.
All my coworker could talk about at work on Monday was the shootings. Earphones firmly lodged in place, volume cranked, I plodded through my daily busywork. Answered phones, answered emails, tried to ignore the updates. Twenty dead. Thirty dead. Thirty dead, twenty injured. Fifty dead. Swallowed my tongue at the editorializing. Sick fucker. Sick humanity. We're just animals. Whatever, it's a Monday, I've got shit to do.
When I got home, I found my roommate had been watching the coverage all day. I still wasn't really that interested, though I did some poking around and fell for the attention-hungry Livejerkoff who everyone thought was the shooter, at first. Who would've thought there were two Asian gun nuts full of self-hatred from Virginia Tech on lj? Fuck, man, by this point I'm surprised there isn't a community for them.
Anyway, at first I didn't think I cared. I'm as bad as everyone else, inured to tragedy by the mockery made of 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq and Katrina by a corrupt government, its media puppets, and the complacent citizens all too eager for easy, comforting answers. Too bad, so sad, can I get on with my life now?
The answer, in fact, is no. I can't. I'm filled with anger and I'm filled with shame. I'm furious that we've skipped over shock and mourning and have moved straight to the poltiics. Before the bodies had even stopped cooling, the dead had been turned into symbols waiting for a cause. Take your pick: Gun control. Gun ownership. Violent videogames. Immigration. Terrorism. Security. Foreigners. We didn't even have an accurate count of the dead before people started trying to figure out what it all meant, what was this a symptom of, what was the cause. Trying to ascribe meaning to something essentially meaningless, and the simpler the meaning, the better. This is how we honor the dead, now: More bickering. More talk. Causes. If only they'd had guns. If only there were no guns. Let's pass a law.
You can't legislate away the dead, you cannibals, and how dare you presume to speak for them.
And I'm trying to explain to my coworker how I find it a bitter pill that this has happened so many times now that we don't even need to recover anymore, we just pick a flag and plant it in the corpse pile with a sickening thwack, and she tries to tell me (like I just fell off the turnip truck) that this is how some people cope, by talking it out and trying to find meaning in these events, and I screwed my eyes shut and said yes, I know how it works and I understand what they're doing, I just really wish that they'd stop it.
All my coworker could talk about at work on Monday was the shootings. Earphones firmly lodged in place, volume cranked, I plodded through my daily busywork. Answered phones, answered emails, tried to ignore the updates. Twenty dead. Thirty dead. Thirty dead, twenty injured. Fifty dead. Swallowed my tongue at the editorializing. Sick fucker. Sick humanity. We're just animals. Whatever, it's a Monday, I've got shit to do.
When I got home, I found my roommate had been watching the coverage all day. I still wasn't really that interested, though I did some poking around and fell for the attention-hungry Livejerkoff who everyone thought was the shooter, at first. Who would've thought there were two Asian gun nuts full of self-hatred from Virginia Tech on lj? Fuck, man, by this point I'm surprised there isn't a community for them.
Anyway, at first I didn't think I cared. I'm as bad as everyone else, inured to tragedy by the mockery made of 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq and Katrina by a corrupt government, its media puppets, and the complacent citizens all too eager for easy, comforting answers. Too bad, so sad, can I get on with my life now?
The answer, in fact, is no. I can't. I'm filled with anger and I'm filled with shame. I'm furious that we've skipped over shock and mourning and have moved straight to the poltiics. Before the bodies had even stopped cooling, the dead had been turned into symbols waiting for a cause. Take your pick: Gun control. Gun ownership. Violent videogames. Immigration. Terrorism. Security. Foreigners. We didn't even have an accurate count of the dead before people started trying to figure out what it all meant, what was this a symptom of, what was the cause. Trying to ascribe meaning to something essentially meaningless, and the simpler the meaning, the better. This is how we honor the dead, now: More bickering. More talk. Causes. If only they'd had guns. If only there were no guns. Let's pass a law.
You can't legislate away the dead, you cannibals, and how dare you presume to speak for them.
And I'm trying to explain to my coworker how I find it a bitter pill that this has happened so many times now that we don't even need to recover anymore, we just pick a flag and plant it in the corpse pile with a sickening thwack, and she tries to tell me (like I just fell off the turnip truck) that this is how some people cope, by talking it out and trying to find meaning in these events, and I screwed my eyes shut and said yes, I know how it works and I understand what they're doing, I just really wish that they'd stop it.
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Date: 6/21/07 04:51 am (UTC)From:I wanted to understand what happened and why when I first heard about it. After that, I was sad about it, but I didn't feel a strong need to come up with some sort of answer. I was kind of disgusted by the fact that everybody did, partly because I knew that any sort of 'answer' was likely to result in a call for legislation that would restrict the behavior of a large number of people who would likely never do such a thing.