An awful thing has happened, as someone went on a rampage at West Virginia University, killing at least 31 people and injuring 10 more. Someone with a mental problem has opened up a social and psychic singularity, a black hole of grief and anguish that will consume several thousand people for years to come. Many will never emerge from its dark influence.
There’s nothing novel about it; we’ve all been here before and it comes in all sizes. There’s Oklahoma City, 9/11, the DC sniper, the Amish school killings, the guy who put acid on playground equipment yesterday (I wonder if he was counting on continuing news coverage?) And now this. And, we shouldn’t forget the world is full of children who grow up in places where tragedies on this scale are pretty much boilerplate in their daily news.
Whenever there is a mass tragedy, there is a wave of sympathy followed by a much larger wave of speculation as to how such a thing can be prevented. Legislators will be grandstanding in front of cameras and microphones, pretending that they know the cause and the solution. TV and radio pundits will go on long after we will all wish they’d just shut up. It will be blamed on lack of gun control, too much gun control, on godlessness, or on religion gone haywire. The finger will point at television, video games, rock music, “goth”, food additives, schools, parents, drugs, alcohol. The solution will be the opposite of all those things, no matter how incompatible they are, plus more guards, more surveillance cameras, tougher laws, and above all, prayer. Lots and lots of prayer, especially in the schools.
So let me just say, you can’t draw very reliable conclusions from statistical outliers. The guy who did this isn’t a needle in a haystack, but a needle in a Kansan vista. There isn’t much to be learned from this atrocity as far as public policy goes. No system can filter out such a rare individual without clogging entirely with the many ordinary people it catches in the same filter. Extremely rare events are difficult to plan for. Simple answers won’t do.
I doubt very much that any system will prevent such events. Even mentally ill people are creative, and they’ll find loopholes. In the end we will end up living with the risk, and also with the laws reflexively sprung into existence afterward.
I suggest two things. First, just listen and think for a year or two. Try to let the event gain some context. Whatever we throw together overnight is likely to do as much harm as good. Second, I suggest kindness. Just random acts of kindness, small words of encouragement to others at unexpected times for no reason at all. It won’t prevent events like this from happening. But it will shine a light against the darkness. Kindness is our most powerful rebellion against tragedy.
Kindness is our most powerful rebellion against tragedy.
That one goes in the quote box, DOF.
(And my Mom, in response to my post about that comment, says, “Amen,” too.)
Not only could I read this post over and over again and never get sick of it, but I could read that line again and never get sick of it.
You also have no idea how happy it makes me to see I am not the only one that thinks this way…
I couldn’t find the words to say what I felt when I heard about this..sorrow, anger, disgust, confusion..who, why..
DOF, can you expand on this? Do you mean in the US relative to the rest of the world?
With today’s globalization, how can you be sure that a large part of the world aren’t the needles?
You say:
And yet, on a daily basis we’ve become numbed to numbers of how many people get blown to smithareenes each day in Baghdad. If these 31 represent thousands that are affected here, how many more thousands are there—lost in their own black holes. What will we do with them?
Are you sure these are outlier events?
I went on ad nauseum about the events today as well. The thing that escapes me is the fundamental mis-understanding of the requirements of ‘locking down’ a University campus; it’s simply impossible.
What hurts my heart is the capacity of fear that we have within our hearts as Americans. Fear will drive many to blame someone and to make University campuses ‘safe’, when anyone who has spent more than a weekend at a University knows that that is an impossible thing.
Great quote and I would add ‘love’ to that as well. To quote Bono quoting Bruce Cockburn: “Heard a singer on the radio late last night – said he’s ‘gonna kick the darkeness till it bleeds daylight’ – I believe in Love’”
We’re highly sensitive to “2” or “5” let alone “10”—yet I can recall the nightly body count during Viet Nam, an order or two of magnitude higher. Perhaps we’re even more sensitive than we were then.
I’d say “humans” vs “Americans.” Though the ideal of attaining absolute safety seems to be fairly American in tone.
Strangely I was not greatly surprised by this one, if fact I am kind of surprised that it hasn’t happened sooner. The mass murder numbers have been growing, maybe because of a growing population which makes for more targets or more nut cases. One of the problems with having an open free society is that to a certain degree you give up security. Like DOF says, I am sure fingers will be pointed in every direction from the local police, colleage campus cops to the homeland security to the white house. I am hoping this was a nut case, and it is what it looks like on the surface. If this by an outside change is an act by terroist then we have a completely differnt problem.
I am narrowly referring to mass shooters in prosperous societies. I read a book by an FBI profiler, the title escapes me now, whose author said there really isn’t a reliable profile of this kind of shooter. And sure enough if you look at the mass crimes I posed as examples, what is the common thread? What predictive profile could have identified the killers in advance?
With hingsight in each case someone has said, “well the signs were obvious” and in some cases they were. But there’s nothing from which to construct a systematic filter on which we could rely for safety. For many people that is frightening – they want to feel safe.
But the fact is they pretty much are safe. The other thing I meant by ‘outlier’ was that such events seem far more common than they really are, thanks to our wired-up society. On the day that Columbine happened, none of the other eighty-eight thousand public schools in the US had a shooting, and that was an extraordinary day. Such events are too rare for statistical analysis against “normal life” so again, no comforting system to hide behind, but we don’t worry about meteors either. These events are more common than meteor strikes, but far, far less common than auto accidents or heart attacks. So we ought to be careful about putting a stranglehold around everyday life to “prevent” them.
Countless thousands, traumatized by war with little hope of recovery. (Thanks for the link) And not only will those individuals suffer, they will themselves tend to be violent and the society around them will suffer. With globalization, as you point out, we can expect visits from their agony. I wish we’d consider that long-term effect (and others as well) before charging off in a patriotic direction to fix the world.
Violence comes in lots of bitter flavors, and that one will be much easier to profile. We manufacture it on an industrial scale so there will be plenty to analyze.
But there probably isn’t a direct connection between this shooting and Iraq, so I’m not trying to make one.
Oh, yeah. The impracticality of some suggestions I’ve heard just staggers me.
Yes. I hope legislators keep that in mind as they rush to appear proactive about this shooting.
Kindness is our most powerful rebellion against tragedy.
Ya know, with a Master’s in Psychology, I couldn’t have said it better.
A friend of mine has a stepbrother who attends Virginia Tech. Had he been where he was supposed to be that day, he would have been in one of the classrooms hit. Although he is alive and relatively okay, the odds just weren’t in his favor. It reminded me that statistics are comforting only while you are standing on the stronger side of them. My friend was pretty shaken up, and I have to admit I wondered if there would come a time when everyone stood only one or two people away from such a tragedy. I thought of my daughter going off to college in a year and not of all the kids who have returned home safely every day in all the years. Between a realistic view and a perception distorted by fear, I think I temporarily walked a fine line. It is so easy to get swept up in fear, especially when it hits so close to home. Anyway, thanks for pulling me out of the tumultuous clouds.
Thanks for a very reasonable and well considered post on this horrible event. I admire your ability to be rational at a time like this.
Hey DOF,
I quoted you rather extensively over at (Parenthetically Speaking)and just realized that i had never got around to telling you, so I’m rectifying that.
You can find the post in question at http://kpatrickglover.wordpress.com/2007/04/20/the-elephant-in-the-middle-of-the-room/
KPG
SUE HIS ASS!!!!
this is very well expressed. Would that our media would take some of it on board.