Pensivity

A few things have happened since I wrote here last. If I may, I'd like to reflect upon them.

Most notably, the Virginia Tech shootings. Normally, I'm one of the first to hear about breaking news. This isn't bragging on my part as much as a reflection of the eye I keep on the media. I want to know what's going on. Once upon a time, I wanted to be a reporter. And every so often, something that happens you will remember the rest of your life. I like to know when those things happen. That Monday, however, I did not know about the shooting until after my 12-1 class. I had heard the words "Virginia Tech" at one point, but nothing else made me suspect that something had happened. When I was made aware of the massacre, I threw myself into it. I watched with wonder and dread the video a student captured on his phone. I heard the pat pat pat of guns firing.
It's weird, juxtaposing actual shooting with the blam-blam action of Hollywood movies. If someone pulls out an assault rifle and sprays bullets everywhere, nobody blinks. But if an actual person fires a handgun, I'm rendered immobile. Perhaps we're not as desensitized to violence as we like to think we are. If so, that has to be a good thing, right?
The United States is a country of roughly 300 million people. 33 died that day in Blacksburg, Virginia. That's .000011% of the population. Yet the death of that .000011% of the people in this country is enough to completely stop us. We're stunned. We're shocked. I was so upset by what happened that I didn't go to my class at 3 p.m. I was genuinely disturbed and frazzled by this. I didn't know anyone shot that day, but it still got to me.
Why? Is it the intrinsic value we place in a human life? Is it the reminder of our mortality? Is it the feeling of helplessness, the inability to do anything but stand aside and watch tragedy unfold? It's likely it's some combination of all of that. The death of a single person is enough to shock a community. We really do find worth an value in every life. Shootings like this, like the shootings at Columbine, in Pennsylvania, they remind us that we're never truly safe, that at any moment, something can happen. And really, there's nothing we can do to stop it.
Rest assured, people will try and claim otherwise. People are already falling over themselves to try and use this incident to further their own goals. We need more guns. We need less guns. We should build walls. We should install land mines. We need laser-equipped robots. Certainly, there are changes that need to be made. There always are. Virginia would be well-served to take a hard look at its gun laws, and the federal government would be equally well-served look at interstate gun sales (the gunman got his pieces from eBay).
The striking part is the compromise of what we thought were safe institutions. We think schools are safe. We think a campus is safe. Reality is much different. If anything, they're more dangerous than walking through downtown Detroit at night. You have teenagers and young adults under a lot of stress and a myriad of other problems running around.
We have a bifurcation in regards to what we consider acceptable deaths. When someone dies in war, that's somehow easier to take than when an "innocent" person is killed. On one level, it's hard for me to understand how we can send people to their deaths (that is what a soldier's fate is) and take it in stride instead of someone suddenly being killed. On another, it makes sense. The death of those at war is never surprising. We brace ourselves for that. We're never ready for someone to run around and kill 32 strangers.

The psychology of this episode is interesting. It's a lot easier to understand what happens in a high school setting. It's fairly straightforward. But this is much different. We don't know if the shooter knew anyone, even the first person he shot down. The video he made complicates the matter further. What was he talking about in that rambling declaration? Why did he do this? Why complete strangers? I know criminologists are pursuing the victim angle, but that's a very superficial answer. What did he feel victimized by? Does it have to do with the fact that he's Korean? Is it something else?
We also have to face the fact that on some level, we failed that man. We could not get him the help he needed before it was too late. It seems as though he felt this was his only option.
The grief of the Virginia Tech community has been well documented. I can't imagine what they're going through. But what about the family of the shooter? I have to believe they're even worse off than the families of the victims. At least the parents of slain students can feel like their children were taken from them. They can live through positive memories. The parents of the shooter will forever be haunted by the fact their son is a mass murderer. That's the final memory of him. He's an infamous figure now. There's no way to put a positive light on that.

Like I said, I was watching the news all day that day, refreshing stories on the Web constantly. I had it on CNN nearly for the next 24 hours. In general, I thought the coverage was solid and done well. However, I started to see graphics declaring "Virginia Tech Massacre" in bold fonts and menacing music playing in the background. This is what I have a problem with. We don't need these things played up. Life is not a video game. It doesn't need to be made more exciting. If any story can speak for itself, it's this one. It doesn't need CNN's help in hyping it up. The American media is so far gone, though, that it can't recognize when such sensational marketing goes beyond even insensitivity and straight into hurtful.

Boris Yeltsin died Monday. And for the life of me, I can't understand why this wasn't a bigger deal. His death passed incredibly quietly. We're talking about one of the most important figures of the late 20th century. I would argue that he was more important than Bush and Clinton in the 90s. Taking Russia from the smoldering ruins of the USSR to democracy and the "shock therapy" free markets was no small feat. There were a lot of people who did not want that to happen. Perhaps history will be kinder to him as time goes on, because he's not getting his due right now.

David Halberstam, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, also died Monday. Admittedly, I was surprised to hear the likes of Peter Gammons calling him the greatest sports journalist of his lifetime. I had never even heard of the guy. But when writer after writer talks about how amazing and wonderful the guy was, I owed it to myself to look him up. And after reading a few pieces of his, I'm wishing it hadn't taken me so long to find him. He truly is a gifted writer. He writes with a liquid smoothness and manages to write some profound things in a very accessible way. He strikes me as a high-class writer than anyone can read and appreciate. Note that I didn't say he lowers the intelligence of his writing or panders to the lower denominator. He is one of those people who is able to communicate intelligent things in a way a lot of people can understand. It's a very rare talent indeed.
A column of his that stood out to me was his musings on sports and 9/11. He wrote it in 2002, a year after the attack on the World Trade Center. He mused on the tendency for people to characterize sports as a way to unite a town, a country, a people, to lift them up and make them feel better in the face of hardship. We certainly did this in 2001, turning to sports as a way to heal our wounds. New York attached itself to the Yankees' World Series run in October. Halberstam said, though, sports are nothing more than a distraction. They don't heal any real hurts, and they don't really unite anyone. And he argued anyone that the more obsessed a fan is, the more his life is probably lacking. You know, there's a lot of truth to that. Everyone knows I'm a huge Bobcat fan... but more and more, I wonder how much it defines me and how much it should define me.
When I was in high school telling people I wanted to go to OU to study journalism, people said, "Oh, you're going to be a sportswriter?" with notable frequency. After a while, I became snippy at this. Why, I said, do people automatically assume I would be a sports reporter? There were more important things in life, more meaningful things. Sports does not define who I am. It doesn't matter in the long run. It's nice when your team wins, but does it really make your life better? And yes, I'm fully aware of the probably hypocrisy currently spouting from my fingertips.
I wonder... if pro sports went away tomorrow, would my life actually improve? It just might.