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Have we become hardened to school shootings?
Contributed by: Dianne Lorang on 2/15/2008

I was walking the treadmill at Buck Recreation Center yesterday when on the TV news I see that there's been yet another school shooting, this time at Northern Illinois University. I assumed it had just happened, but it had happened at least an hour before.But as far as I could tell, it hadn't been on the news yet. I had been watching while cycling and lifting weights. Instead, the top news story was Mitt Romney throwing his support to John McCain.

When the news did report the school shooting, it said that it wasn't as bad as Virginia Tech last year because not as many people had died, or something to that effect. In other words, it was as if the media had decided after Virginia Tech that school shootings had become commonplace, and like Columbine before it, Virginia Tech was now how we measured how newsworthy a school shooting is.

I still thought it would be THE NEWS that night, like Virginia Tech and Columbine before it. But NO, the main news was still the race for the White House. And although it was the cover story for the Rocky Mountain News this morning, the actual story was put on page 33, and only page 33. In other words, it was back on the pages where the newspapers puts the violence in Iraq and other disturbing and violent national and international news.

On the inside cover where the RMN lists the stories in the paper, it was featured online today with "Plan your weekend." And the second most important of the top stories, which didn't even list the Illinois shooting, was "Valentine's Day vows exchanged." It struck me as strange that a major newspaper in the community that lived through Columbine didn't consider this story worthy of more than a couple pages.

It also struck me as strange that Britney Spears' mental breakdown got more cable news coverage, as far as I could tell. Of course, the Spears' story got more coverage than the ongoing Iraq War, and certainly the Afghanistan War along with all the other violence in the world covered regularly by the BBC news, but not cable news. The pundits would rather focus on just one story at a time, it seems, and right now, that story is politics.

Although I am for Obama and have a bumper sticker and a sign in my yard, I still realize that it is a long time until the primary season is over and the Democrats and Republics officially select their candidates for president. In the meantime, life goes on, or doesn't for the 5 killed in Illinois yesterday, the many more wounded, plus the gunman who killed himself.

As a mother of a daughter who was a senior in a high school only five miles from Columbine when that school shooting was THE NEWS for a very long time, I am wondering if we have now become hardened to school shootings. Just like since 9/11 we seem to turn a deaf ear to President Bush talking about terror threats and a blind eye to the homeland security's color of the day.

It's not that we don't care, it's that we can only take so much. Was a time when we didn't get all the bad news from around the years with just a click of a button on our laptops or a flick of a channel on our remote controls. Was a time when we were more protected, not subjected to national and international tragedy continually. We were more community oriented rather than world oriented. And as such, we were more willing to pay attention because it made a difference to our lives.

Plus we felt like we could do something about it. But now, we hear and see so much that we have no control over that we must at some level shut down and shut it off. It is, after all, human nature to protect oneself. It is why our war vets sometimes suffer from addiction and/or mental illness. They have seen and experienced more horror than young men and women raised in the United States have been wired to see and experience. As human beings, they need to escape.

And so do we. Right now, it is fun to watch the race for the White House, especially between Obama and Clinton. It is like watching a climbing rock star drawing crowds as opposed to a several-time-nominated-for-an-Academy- Award-but-never-winning movie star draw smaller crowds. It's fun. And after all the tragedy and fear we as a nation have experienced because of and since Columbine and 9/11, we need to have a little fun with hope for change thrown in for good measure.


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Showing 1 of 1 comments
Submitted By: Barbara Neff
posted on 2/16/2008 @ 9:01:39 AM
Rated Story
In answer to the question in your headline, I believe the answer is "yes". I think sadness, frustration and the sheer magnitude of our feelings of helplessness cause us to eventually look away. Good observations.
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CONTRIBUTOR INFORMATION

Dianne Lorang

Littleton , CO

Dianne Lorang has posted 10 stories and 0 comments since joining on 9/9/2007. Dianne Lorang 's average story rating is 5.
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