Along these lines, having the brother of a Columbine shooting victim offer unsolicited advice on television to the dorm-building neighbor of a VT victim may have been a nice newsroom editorial brainstorm idea, but I just don’t need to see it.
Having a major network news anchor knot up his brow and alter his evening news closing line, itself a rip-off of Walter Cronkite and any number of his more worthy predecessors, is not a gesture that matters to me.
My concern at the moment is supporting a grieving community—although distant from my own, one that the bonds of basic humanity compel me to care about, nonetheless. However, I do not need—in order to prove or simply confirm this support—soft-focus still photographs of the victims flashed on a television screen with all the trappings of an Olympic athlete’s “up-close and personal” video profile.
These were sweet, beautiful, intelligent, lively kids who were senselessly cut down. My heart breaks for their families and friends. I weep for the shattered VT community, and for all who feel the breach of trust, and loss of faith that such terrors inflict. And I am capable of mourning without knowing the GPA of the victims or the names of their pets. Would it have been more tragic, or less so, if these had been senior citizens in a retirement home, or Mexican women murdered in the desert around Juarez; New Orleans hospital patients, or shoppers at an Afghan marketplace?
Have I become so inured to human suffering that I need a saccharine television pundit to “put a human face” on the tragedy? I hope not.
I watched the “invocation”—or was it a memorial service? I watched it for one or two minutes. When the politicians started reciting boilerplate condolences, I had to turn it off. I felt dirty from intruding, the moment they cut to the stunned students’ faces. I think some things are private, even if there’s a live satellite uplink.
Part of what I must contend with personally is not being there in person—not being part of that community, and in spite of my most heartfelt and sincere sympathies, not understanding what those students and their university community are feeling. Not really. In the same way, my family in California can’t really understand what it was like to be in New York City on 9/11; I’ll never really understand what my father lived through, pinned down in a frozen fox-hole in Korea; and—regardless of how often I dream about it—I’ll never know what was going on in my dear friend’s mind just before he killed himself. More facts don’t bridge those gaps. Nor will fewer facts diminish the limited capacity I have to understand.
