I, once again, haven’t posted for ten days and, once again, the responsibility for my slacking lies directly at the feet of my mental health. There have not been any recent developments or changes to speak of–I just haven’t had it in me to write. Or work, read, talk, or think clearly, for that matter, since that goofy damned dissociative break I had in the process of composing my last entry here. After sleeping all day today, I’m forcing myself to get to work now based on the theory that if I act better I will feel better. It usually works…so maybe today I’ll actually wash my hair. I even put on a bra.
I’ve been thinking about writing this for the past few days, obviously as a result of what happened Monday at Virginia Tech. I don’t feel that I have anything salient to add to everything that has been written or said since about that unspeakable tragedy–there are so many writers more expressive and prolific than me who have done it in much better and more timely ways. My soul aches for everyone involved: the students and instructors who were killed or injured, snuffing out unlimited potential; their families and friends who are bearing such unimaginable loss; the survivors, now dealing for life with issues I can’t begin to understand; professors and administrators who did everything they could to get help for the killer before this happened and now will be forever second-guessed for their actions during and after. And, though it’s not popular, I feel pain for that killer’s family. We simply don’t know enough about them to know how much they were aware of his illness–how far gone he was the last time they saw him, or how successfully he may have hidden his state of mind from them. We can’t even know if there were monsters within that family unit who may have contributed to his madness. I feel comfortable, though, in asserting that there is at least one person, somewhere, who loved him and did their best for him and was proud when he did well and today is beyond grief-stricken that it all went so horribly, bloodily wrong.
There are things, however, that I feel the need to write.
It is a beautiful aspect of the American personality, and universally positive, that we see no advantage in folding inward to grieve, alone and lonely; in fact, we seem to not only need but to crave collective, community expressions of our pain and loss. It is absolutely right and proper to grieve the loss of life suffered in Blacksburg this week, for us strangers as well as for those more directly connected to the lost–it is shocking and horrifying and sad, and so the candlelight vigils and makeshift memorials and black ribbons and ballcaps are welcome, even expected.
What is striking to me, in contrast, is the abject absence of this communal grief when we violently lost an equal number of committed, innocent, promising young people within the past two weeks. Kids, mostly of similar age as those murdered at Va Tech, a great many of whom were in harm’s way in order to finance their own dreams of higher education. Other than obituaries or occasional articles in local newspapers, these dead Americans typically are no more than brief headlines on the news and to our larger society–the networks don’t put together tribute galleries for them and few ever hear their names–and their families often have to fight just to get to the truth of how they were killed. Where is our grief for them?
Maybe after four years of those losses in the desert we’re just…numb. All grieved out. Maybe it’s because we accept that, as the cliche goes, war is hell, while our every expectation is that if a 2o year old can be safe anywhere it should be in German class. It’s certainly less jarring, losing kids at the rate of one or two, or six, a day than thirty-two in a single morning, but those dribs and drabs of bloody death have added up to a decent-sized city’s next generation. Besides, the news folks can all go live from the American south much more safely than they can from north of Baghdad; we don’t broadcast their memorial services–in fact, we’re forbidden to see them come home. Whatever the reasons, I wish we were lighting more candles for them, as well as the Iraqis violently dying at the rate of thirty or more in Baghdad alone every day.
I wish, too, that this was a sentiment I saw more of in the media. Maybe they’re afraid of being called anti-American again, like the shitstorm that hit Ted Koppel a couple years ago because the damned Commie wanted to read the names of the dead on Nightline. Mourning lives lost in war is not, however the Limbaughs and O’Reilly’s might sputter and spit, a political statement. It is a human one.
[I'm happy to say that my imaginary boyfriend, Keith Olbermann, offered just such a segment on Tuesday--included below--and I've seen a few similar pieces online from people I respect like Juan Cole (scroll down to the April 17 entry).]
