As we sit at our desks, programming our websites or writing our magazine articles or doing our homework, the world keeps turning, and 32 people are fatally shot at a school in West Virginia before the killer turns the gun on himself. We pick through every shred of evidence, tangential or not, trying to pinpoint what video games or music or law passed by the other side is to blame. We eat up media time with every new development, speculating without having the full picture, blaming anyone that seems to fit our idea of the bad guy. If he’s Korean, then by god all you Orientals are under the suspicious eye. And hey, aren’t most Koreans Muslim, anyway?
As we maneuver through rush hour traffic, watch the evening news, pile the dirty plates into the dishwasher, another day dawns on the other side of the world, another vest-wearing zealot takes himself off the board along with 127 random people in a marketplace. Mothers, brothers, lonely old men and children just learning to talk catch the shrapnel, shuffling off without ever having a chance to say anything else. But this is another place, not ours; another people, not ours. This happens to them every day, but not us, not ever. This is a religious thing, another religion, not ours. It qualifies as news, though, because some of our people — brothers, fathers, sons — are there, and we hope that their problems aren’t suddenly forced on us.
As we listen to NPR on our way to our office jobs or scan the morning TV for something slightly less insipid than what’s on or flip through our iPods on the walk across campus, another gunshot goes off in a nieghborhood, and another young life is snuffed out. This isn’t our world, either, though we might drive through it on the weekends, or work there (as quickly as possible, though, ’cause sometimes those bullets aren’t as precise or picky about where they might lodge), or maybe even live right down the street. That’s a world we rose above with our expensive education, one that we were never in danger of because our parents weren’t lazy or criminal. That’s bad parenting and drugs on the other side of the tracks, two things we don’t have to worry about. But still, it’s just around the corner, and some of us do have to work there, or drive through, so we register it on our media radar, but it’s not much more than a blip, a ten second brief between the new football coach and Paris Hilton’s nipples.
We don’t mean to belittle these other tragedies, these other deaths, but they happen every day! And to other people, for easy to understand reasons. And maybe, if we can just find a simple explanation for the things that happen to us — middle- and upper-class America, safe from the violence we celebrate and encourage by virtue of our bank accounts — then maybe we can sleep better at night, knowing that all the things we have to fear are across oceans and poverty lines. In the recesses of our minds, though, I like to think that we all realize — the right-wing ultra-religious housewives and the super-liberal pot smoking academics alike — that there is no simple reason, no singular point-of-fault. I have a friend who is American with Korean parents; he never shot anyone. I have friends whose parents are gun nuts; they’ve never shot anyone. I suffer from bipolar disorder, and I’ve never shot anyone. I’ve read things vastly more disturbing (and more well-written) than what Cho Seung-Hui put on paper; to my knowledge, Pahlaniuk and Ellis and King have never gone on homicidal rampages. I play video games, and watch horror movies, and listen to heavy metal, and read Stephen King, and was bullied in school…
The list goes on, just like the world. Maybe you’ll realize that you’ve got a lot in common with the killers of the world, and wonder why you turned out better; maybe you’ll decide that there’s no real explanation for some things, that insanity and chaos are real, but just when you think you’ve got the answer, that you’ve figured it all out, someone will come along and prove you completely wrong.
That is, assuming that it happens to you, or someone enough like you that you notice, much less care.