I wanted to write on the troublesome media coverage of the Virginia Tech story, but somebody else says it better:
And once the private violence becomes public, we hear it on the news, we find out from a friend, we hear it in the car on the way to work, we all distance ourselves again. He was a loner, he was strange, he never talked, he was weird/scary/abnormal/depressed/mad/upset/hurt hurt hurt–he wasn’t one of us. His violence is not our violence because he wasn’t one of us. We’re not crazy, we’re not insane, we’re not odd, and we’re most certainly not on anti-depressants. At least not the crazy people kind of anti-depressants…
…The most horrible thing I’ve heard throughout the coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting has been that police did nothing after the first shootings because they had believed it to be “just” or “only” a “domestic” issue. Nobody will even call it for what it is. They thought some crazy asshole had killed his girlfriend. Sad, but not important enough to shut down a thriving campus. Disturbing, but not urgent enough to send swat teams up and down the hallways, banging on doors, pushing people out of classrooms at gunpoint.
Some of this has been alleviated in tonight’s news coverage but I’m already disgusted. Read the whole thing.
i just hear a newscaster say “he was a nobody”
“I’m nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too?…”