Comments | creepingivy: The World, Somebody Wrote, Is The Place We Prove Real By Dying In It.

creepingivy

The World, Somebody Wrote, Is The Place We Prove Real By Dying In It.

Dec 15, 2012 19:10

I was in a school shooting ( Read more... )

Comments 5

wolodymyr December 16 2012, 15:47:28 UTC

Thanks for writing this. The silencing, so standard, so creepy. I find it pretty easy to imagine you there, rightly or wrongly.

creepingivy December 17 2012, 08:17:58 UTC

The odd thing is I never made the connection until I was maybe in high school when the first nationally televised coverage of school shootings began that there was little follow-up in my experience. It wasn't even fact-finding. It was just a neurotic level of denial and pretending it didn't happen. Which pretty much sums up to me how people have reacted to the events on Friday as a whole. Denial needing to neatly tie this up and put it away and pretending that we're so very horrified but so very far removed from that place over there in Connecticut.

pyr8queen December 17 2012, 00:47:24 UTC

I agree that the issue is way more complicated than people trumpeting one-sided solutions make it out to be - mental health, gun control, etc. But I think that the media's all pervasive atmosphere has exacerbated rather than helped the situation. Immediately after the Connecticut shooting, another shooting happened in a California mall. It's very possible that the second shooter was imbued with some sort of sense of purpose by the relentless media coverage of the Connecticut shooting. Or maybe not. Whatever the issue is, it seems very unique in many respects to the U.S. Sure, sometimes things happen in other countries, but no one is as "known" for school shootings as the U.S. And that's a terrible thing to be known for.

creepingivy December 17 2012, 08:27:10 UTC

It is, it really is. I wonder on some level if this a way that growing pains exhibits itself when we're not talking about a personality but instead an idea like nationalism and our concept of what our country is? The US by contrast to a lot of first-world countries is pretty young. We haven't had the hundreds and hundreds of years that Europe and Asia has had to slug out and shed a lot of blood for their sense of country, sense of social contract, sense of religion, sense of well... all of it. We've had less than 300 and in that time, we've fought relatively few classically defined wars among ourselves (though we love a good ideological fight and we've fought many of those for years ( ... )

_cheshirekitty_ December 17 2012, 20:27:58 UTC

Wow. I grew up pretty close to where you went to school and never heard a peep about that. I can see how there wouldn't otherwise be much cause to bring up the experience later in life unless you felt fundamentally altered by it. Your story really highlights the huge contrast of relative isolation we had not too long ago and the way news is shared now. It really has become more democratic in terms of what we bother to respond to and thus see more of, but the reporting continues to carry a for-profit dramatic slant we could do without. As far as I can tell we are at the point of having those conversations about mental health, gun control and all the angles... maybe I've become more isolated by not watching as much of the spoon-fed media I'm guessing your comments are addressing. I try to watch tv but it's so stupid I can only take so much. Fixing what's wrong there requires people who know better to subject themselves to the lunacy ( ... )