Macewoudd.

EVENT

1. The big ones, the ones involving people in our demographic (generally speaking), have seemed to happened in March or April. Columbine happened in April, the Kayla Rolland shooting happened in March, the Oklahoma City Bombing happened in April. Jonesboro was late March. Ditto for the Red Lake High School Massacre. What is it about early spring that nudges on explosions/self-destructions among the median group of Americans? Is it the pheromones? Is it something in the air? There are numerous exceptions. Maybe there's no correlation. Maybe it's a statistical bulge, not even a coincidental relationship.

2. For me, hearing about these events always inspires a feeling of deja vu: they seem fundamentally the same. Almost to the point of feeling identical. I'm sure that this is partly the luxury of bearing witness from a distance (which itself might be contradiction or oxymoronic). Still, the observation feels like it carries factual weight: differences are incidental and superficial. Similarities are immediately apparent and profound.

3. In 2000, speaking of the Kayla Rolland shooting, I said that this is my particular generation's ghost to wrestle with. It is our closest approximation to Jim Crow laws, to Great Depression privations, to gilded age nativism. That is, while mass-murder is a feature of every time and every place, it has experienced a meaningful proliferation since the 1990s. It is the self-destructive impulse that, at this point in time, makes itself into our zeitgeist, and gains significance as such. In thirty years, it will be one of the most significant yardsticks of how our children evaluate us socially. This observation is borne out as my generation ages.

4. This is interesting.

5. Jess and I are both fortunate not to have known anyone hurt in the events at Virginia Tech. But it is just as worth remembering that the less sensational terrors in the world are much more fatal: disease, starvation, pollution, and attrition. Even in the U.S., automobile fatalities (~40,000/year) and preventable deaths (like lung cancer from smoking - ~150,000/year) far outweigh "conventional" homicide (~30,000/year), which itself is annually one thousand times the death toll of this particular event. Not to trivialize anything. If we are shocked into appalled silence, it should be an expansive horror, and a correspondingly expansive silence.

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