It’s cold inside.
8:20 p.m.
Suddenly, the loss of life means very little. People go on with their daily routines, cluck their tongues, say, “Isn’t it awful?” and resume sending jokes by email. I personally have been touched by the stories of the individuals in this tragedy, of the 76-year-old holocaust survivor who leaned on the classroom door and made sure that his students had escaped via the windows before the gunman burst in and killed him in cold blood, of the French teacher who came from Montreal and whose family is surely grieving today. To the general public, it may be killing as usual, but to the families of the victims, it is a horror show.
That is not to belittle the deaths that occur daily in Iraq, or any other part of the world for that matter. There is so much loss of life every single day on a global basis that we cannot start to account for it. So we prefer to think only about what is close to home, or what affects us personally. The families of killed soldiers are bereft, but their sons and daughters opted for a profession that does sometimes call for the ultimate sacrifice. There is no secret that soldiers die. Do we feel sympathy, though, for the mothers and fathers of the suicide bombers? Do we grieve with the families of the women who were just going to market when they were blown to pieces by one of their own countrymen?
In the newspaper today there is an article about the incidence of school shootings in the U.S. (and Canada, yes it happens here too, even with our restrictive gun laws). After 9/11, people just kind of shut down emotionally. We see so much violence on television, both real and dramatic, that we tend to be able to watch a man be blown to pieces by a land mine and only wince, if that. Compare movies made in the 50’s with movies made today: in the older films, the violence all happens off-screen; in modern movies, if we don’t see it with our own eyes, we don’t think the movie has delivered our money’s worth.
I have been trying to figure out what would make a person kill 32 random people with a single-minded determination, people who actually never did him any personal harm. Even if I can analyze the killer psychologically--a loner from an Asian background, a mediocre student, whereas his sister was the star scholar in the family, graduating from Princeton, the pressure this boy must have felt from his family in a culture where the male child is supposed to excel--it still doesn’t explain his actions. All I can think is that he was in such pain, such mental anguish, that he felt he needed to end his own life and take out as many others as he could with him, in a “cleansing” kind of action. I don’t really know; I’m just making this up as I go along.
Tomorrow or the next day, or maybe the day after that, I will get over this just like everyone else, I will find some other topic to write about, and I will forget. But for those 33 families, there is no forgetting. Sons, daughters, wives, husbands and grandfathers will not be coming home again, ever. They were not soldiers. Most of them were hardly more than children. I refuse to look on this as just another statistic. I’m sorry.
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