Clarity

All at once, during a Bill Moyer interview with Jon Stewart, I have had a realization.

For over a week, I have been struggling internally with the lack of grief I have felt in regards to the shootings at Virginia Tech. Up to this point, I have not even expressed my confusion over the numbness I have felt about this situation. But suddenly it is clear to me why I have had this feeling (or rather, this lack of feeling), and so now I feel the need to talk about it.

On the day that 33 people died at Virginia Tech, at least 150 people died in four bombings in Iraq. Thousands of people starved to death because their countries are too wrapped up in war or paying back odious foreign debt to provide food for their people. Millions of people lost their lives to diseases that could have been prevented or treated if only health care was treated as a right instead of a privilege.

These things happen everyday. These are the numbers that roll around in my mind every night. The incident at Virginia Tech was a tragedy and the media treated it as such. But the tragedies of the every day, they are so often treated as sub-news: headlines scrolling across the bottom of the television screen, sentence fragments placed on the sidebar of news network websites, incidents mentioned in passing by newsreaders at the top of every hour.

In a world of 24-hour news networks (Plural! That's more than 100 hours of news each day!), tragedies should be reported with the weight and respect that they deserve. Time should be given for the audience to get to know the victims and to allow for the immensity of the issue to sink in. People need time to process violence, tragedy, and death in particular. For that reason, I believe the shootings at Virginia Tech were handled well by the media. But why, with hours upon countless hours available for reporting the news, are other incidents not given the same time? Why do we allow time for the people of the U.S. to process and grieve over the passing of its own youngest and brightest, but we do not allow time for the same people to process and grieve over the passing of others'? We all belong to the same world. We are all each other's people. Nations be damned. We're all in this together.

I have feeling of ambivalence about Virginia Tech because I give myself time to process and grieve over every loss. And in the wake of the thousands and millions who I grieve for every day, dealing with the deaths of a few dozen college students (with whom I may have shared a mutual acquaintance) just doesn't take that long, doesn't take that much energy, doesn't make me stop and cry out in pain.

A few years ago, I became hyper sensitized to tragedy. I gained the ability to feel the weight and the pain of millions who I have never met. I did this by going out and exploring the world and discovering that although I cannot always see these people that they are out there, that their lives and decisions impact the world just as much as mine.

After such an intense ordeal and period of growth, I find myself experiencing the flip side of hyper-sensitization: desensitization. But I have not been desensitized by violent films, by violent video games, or by violent news programs. It was the violent world that did it to me. It's happening to you, too.