(no subject)

[sophiaserpentia]

Yesterday, a gunman at the campus of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, identified by the police as student Cho Seung-Hui, shot 32 people dead and injured many others before killing himself.

I've seen this described in numerous places as a "tragedy."  I do not personally believe that "tragedy" is an appropriate word to describe this.  Nor would i approve of "calamity," "catastrophe," or "disaster."

Atrocity, yes.  Monstrous, cruel, heinous, vicious, villainous, ruthless, brutal, bloodthirsty, yes.

But my objection to words like "tragedy" is that this serves to bury the fact that this was an intentional act, an act of deliberate and malicious harm of one human being against others.  Words like "tragedy", "calamity," "catastrophe" and "disaster" all imply the workings of fate, or accident, or the gods, or evil stars, or some other great external overwhelming force -- not a human being.  They imply that what we need is catharsis and closure, not examination and scrutiny.  In fact i'm already seeing hostility towards those who might ask why this happened, as if it is not our place to wonder.

I think what causes this reaction is that events like this traumatize us, and our first instinct as survivors is to appease, to not stir trouble.

Violence is not caused by a great external overwhelming force, not even violence on an unimaginable scale.  It is caused by something that we (most of us) have the power and will to overcome.  Examining violence with the goal of understanding it and lessening it will not bring on the wrath of the gods; it is something we must do.  And there is no better time than the present, because there is violence right now, everywhere, in your community, in mine.

This isn't to pick on anyone in particular, FWIW.  It's the media that sets the tone for things like this, and they are plastering the word "tragedy" all over the place.

Comments

[alobar.livejournal.com]

The Xian monsters compound the problem.

"Why did this happen, you ask? It's simple. Your military chose to shoot at the servants of God today, and all they got for their effort was terror. Then, the LORD your God sent a crazed madman to shoot at your children. Was God asleep while this took place? Was He on vacation? Of course not. He willed this to happen to punish you for assailing His servants."

http://community.livejournal.com/dark_christian/791926.html

> Violence is not caused by a great external overwhelming force,
> not even violence on an unimaginable scale. It is caused by
> something that we (most of us) have the power and will to overcome.

Somes I agree, but sometimes the environment plays a big part in shaping people's reactions. See The Lucifer Effect
http://www.pacificviews.org/weblog/archives/002585.html

KQED's Forum had an interview Monday with Professor Phillip Zimbardo, the psychologist that ran the Stanford Prison experiment back in 1971. It's a fascinating interview and if you have time, it would be well worth your while to listen to the whole piece.

Professor Zimbardo recently published a book called The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil based on that early study and from an intensive look at what that experiment could tell us about what happened at Abu Ghraib. Professor Zimbardo believes that one thing his experiment did was to show how anyone is capable of doing evil things when the situation in which they operate makes that seem normal.

typos corrected

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

Fortunately i've never encountered a Christian willing to accept the Phelps brood of zergs as siblings in faith. I don't know what else they can do besides saying, "They don't speak for us." (Although i don't know if the Westboro Baptist Church enjoys tax-exempt status; that might be a good place to start.)

By "we" i mean collectively as well as individually. I agree with the Lucifer Effect but feel that we have a collective responsibility to work against the development and maintenance of environments where people feel like violence and abuse is "normal."

Re: typos corrected

[orb2069.livejournal.com]

The information in Addicted to hate (http://blank.org/addict/) is probably dated, but I think that over half the Phelpes clan is licenced to practice law in various states: They apparently carpet-bomb people with lawsuits when they feel they're being interfered with. I doubt they'd give up tax exempt status without one king hell of a fight.

[threeandnine.livejournal.com]

I noticed that connotation in the news coverage, as though this were some sort of "accident."

I'm sure the "tragedy" part refers to the aftermath, but I look at these horrific acts as reason to examine societal norms as a whole, and so far, I haven't seen any genuine discussion of that related to any of these "tragedies."

I'd like to think that we are evolving collectively as a race, but I really don't see it.

And that's tragic.

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

::nods::

I think it may be a survival mechanism, but it is one that makes it awfully difficult sometimes to talk about why people sometimes do things like this and what we can do to head it off.

[threeandnine.livejournal.com]

Well, on the bright side, "Grindhouse" flopped at the box office...maybe the hours and hours of graphic sexualized aggression is not as titillating as it once was (yikes, I'm sounding like a censor).

[zarq.livejournal.com]

CNN called it a "massacre" this morning.

I think that's entirely accurate.

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

Massacre -- yes. Better than atrocity even.

[zarq.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you said this, by the way. I usually pay close attention to the language used by various news outlets regarding the news -- and had a similar reaction to the way this story was being reported.

Context did make a difference, though. For instance, on this morning's Today Show, Meredith Viera used the word "tragedy" when she spoke to friends and classmates of those who died. But when she reported on the shootings, she used "murder" "horror", "vicious", "brutal", "mass-killing" and "senseless". She called the dead what they were -- victims, and made it quite clear that they were innocents who had been murdered, not abstractions. I haven't ever really thought of her as a particularly "deep" journalist, (and it's not as if "Today" is particularly hard-hitting,) but she earned my respect and admiration this morning.

By contrast, many of the talking heads on MSNBC and FoxNews made it sound as if this were an act of G-d.

You see this insanity?

[alobar.livejournal.com]

"BLOOMFIELD HILLS -- A lockdown at Cranbrook Schools has been lifted this morning after about an hour of searching for a man reportedly walking near the campus in high-heeled shoes and a wig."
http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070417/UPDATE/704170417/1003

Re: You see this insanity?

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

WTF? No, i hadn't seen it.

"Hide the kids! There's a tranny on the loose!"

Re: You see this insanity?

[nebris.livejournal.com]

Oh, brother... ;P

~M~

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

Well, i'm glad that there is ongoing gun control dialogue in our culture, but if we are going to be an armed society, we could at least perhaps put bulletproof doors and windows in places where people gather -- like school and offices -- since this is where most mass shootings happen. People don't want to think about it "happening here"? Tough -- if we have guns it can happen anywhere.