Dueling Tragedies

This past week the US experienced another tragedy, this time in the form of a mass homicide at Fort Hood Military Base in Killeen, Texas. Thirteen were pronounced dead in the shooting. The events proximity to the Veterans Day holiday has lead to mourning across the country.

I first learned about this incident on my Yahoo homepage. I was shocked at Yahoo's decision of making this headline a secondary story, overshadowed by an article about "the ten best suburbs in America". I could not understand the reasoning for this order. I looked on and read a three sentence long report of the incident, this only added to my disbelief. Our country had endured a great loss and all Yahoo has to say about it is three measly sentences. These circumstances by which I learned of this horrific story generated a terribly impersonal rationale for this occurrence. I have a hard time admitting this now, but I essentially looked past the incident, thinking that because soldiers had died it wasn't so bad. I had gotten myself to believe that soldiers were in a line of duty, and death was a bi-product of their work. After thinking about the incident more deeply I realize the exact opposite was true. Soldiers are a beacon of heroism for this country, and should be immensely valued and respected for their commitment to their nation

But I could not let this go. I began to wonder how I let myself come to this conclusion. I'm not a bad person and I support our military completely, how could I have justified such a horrible crime? I drew a connection very quickly to the Virginia Tech shootings. It was a shockingly similar situation. Two individuals, both deranged, and both motivated by a dislike of their standing in society and the ideals of the country they lived in. Despite the similarity of the massacres, I had a very different reaction to the VT shootings. Basically, when I learned about the shootings, I was scared. I learned of this incident in a similar manner, except TIME had don't a little better job than Yahoo. I remember the headline in all caps across the entire page, with an image of the victim's family members crying.

I was impacted by the VT shootings more than the ones at Fort Hood simply because I was selfish. The tragedy at Fort Hood occurred on a military base, a context that is foreign to me. But the murders at Virginia Tech, on the other hand, took place in a school, a realm that I experience on a daily basis. I had, however naively, come to believe that schools should be, and were immune from the horrors of violence. This assumption was shattered by the events at Virginia Tech. This left me demoralized, and even slightly scared that the possibility of such a thing happening at my school. But where had all these sentiments stemmed from? My initial reactions of both the shootings had come from the media. Those initial reactions to these shootings led me to rationalize poorly, and even made me think inhumanely. This makes me wonder if the media should really be charged with dispensing such news if the manner in which they do it can affect a persons own humanity. Do we charge the media with too great of a task? Do we even trust the media to deliver such information?