The Virginia shooting and the inevitable scapegoating
Up until this point I have been deliberately avoiding any coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting. Generally any time a school shooting occurs I turn the news off for quite some time. But today while hanging out in Barnes and Noble, I finally picked up a copy of Newsweek and read the articles in it. Pretty much everything I expected it to be.
I don't like reading about things like this because they always remind me that I perfectly fit the profile of a mass murderer. Just about everything they were saying about that guy, about his life, the things he did, his mentality, the way people treated him and reacted to him, it all could've easily been about me. I have the right background, the life long trouble with people and fitting into the world, I am that socially isolated, I am that angry and depressed and frustrated and life shits on me almost constantly and always has.
Always nice to be reminded yet again that my life is so pathetic that the idea of murdering a bunch of people and then killing myself ought to be making sense to me. (don't any of you worry now, no plans in the works)
Of course a bigger reason I had been avoiding this coverage was more personal than even that. I had heard rumors early on about his disturbing writing and how some teacher tried to stage an intervention for him based on that. And naturally the articles I was reading hammered that fact home every single chance that they could get, calling it, "a clear and obvious sign of the violence to come" (or something like that, we get my point).
Boy did that turn my stomach into knots, because I can just imagine now the nation wide witch hunts that should be starting against everybody attending school who has ever written anything violent. They're going to have to be pulled aside now and "helped" whether they actually need help or not, and likely they don't. And why? Because this asshole wrote violent things and then acted out on it, and in that narrow minded box mentality that people do so well, everyone who does the same thing will end up the same way.
Admittedly, in light of future events, his particular style of writing does seem quite telling. But on its own, it means nothing. A lot of people have violent imaginations, some make a lot of money off of it, it doesn't mean there is anything wrong with them or that they're going to go out and kill people.
It concerns me because I've been in that position nearly the entire time that I was in school. And this was even before people who looked like me, acted like me, with my entertainment tastes and my crappy social life started going on kill sprees at school; I always had people looking at me like I was going to do something and I can only imagine how much worse it would've been if I was still in school after the massacre in Colorado (I probably would've been locked up just to be on the safe side, and there were teachers at my high school that would've had it done solely out of spite; I really lucked out there). I've been through those interventions on multiple occasions, and for things that were a whole hell of a lot worse than the violent plays he wrote described in the article.
Any kid who ends up a target in the violence crack down is going to be screwed. Again as someone who has been there, done that, founded the club and made the t-shirt, there isn't anything you can do to save yourself from the spotlight. I mean, how do you defend yourself against the accusation that you are going to kill someone at some unspecified point in the distant future? You can't. There is no defense you can mount against something so insubstantial. No argument you can make, however logical (like bringing up Stephen King, Clive Barker, Wes Craven, John Carpenter, I did it all the time) will have any effect if the people involved are already convinced that they're right. And if they bothered to stage the intervention, they're convinced. If its gotten to this point you already have a label put on you, you are going to be "helped" whether you want to be or not.
And as the victim of people's attempts to "help," you'll have to excuse my extreme skepticism that it would've done any good at all. In my own experience, the only kind of "help" these people offer is the kind that makes everything so much worse than it was to begin with.
What happened in Virginia was awful, no argument there (and I won't comment much on the shooting itself, its been commented on a thousand times over and I have nothing new to add). And I get wanting to minimize the chances of something like this ever happening again. But unfortunately whenever horrible things happen people overreact in their prevention zeal. A lot of people fit that image of what a school shooter is, and most of us have never done anything, and while we may occasionally talk about running through a crowd of people with a chainsaw (or is that just me?) we're more than likely not going to ever do that. But sadly, for the next several months at least (and almost definitely longer) people aren't going to remember that.
I don't like reading about things like this because they always remind me that I perfectly fit the profile of a mass murderer. Just about everything they were saying about that guy, about his life, the things he did, his mentality, the way people treated him and reacted to him, it all could've easily been about me. I have the right background, the life long trouble with people and fitting into the world, I am that socially isolated, I am that angry and depressed and frustrated and life shits on me almost constantly and always has.
Always nice to be reminded yet again that my life is so pathetic that the idea of murdering a bunch of people and then killing myself ought to be making sense to me. (don't any of you worry now, no plans in the works)
Of course a bigger reason I had been avoiding this coverage was more personal than even that. I had heard rumors early on about his disturbing writing and how some teacher tried to stage an intervention for him based on that. And naturally the articles I was reading hammered that fact home every single chance that they could get, calling it, "a clear and obvious sign of the violence to come" (or something like that, we get my point).
Boy did that turn my stomach into knots, because I can just imagine now the nation wide witch hunts that should be starting against everybody attending school who has ever written anything violent. They're going to have to be pulled aside now and "helped" whether they actually need help or not, and likely they don't. And why? Because this asshole wrote violent things and then acted out on it, and in that narrow minded box mentality that people do so well, everyone who does the same thing will end up the same way.
Admittedly, in light of future events, his particular style of writing does seem quite telling. But on its own, it means nothing. A lot of people have violent imaginations, some make a lot of money off of it, it doesn't mean there is anything wrong with them or that they're going to go out and kill people.
It concerns me because I've been in that position nearly the entire time that I was in school. And this was even before people who looked like me, acted like me, with my entertainment tastes and my crappy social life started going on kill sprees at school; I always had people looking at me like I was going to do something and I can only imagine how much worse it would've been if I was still in school after the massacre in Colorado (I probably would've been locked up just to be on the safe side, and there were teachers at my high school that would've had it done solely out of spite; I really lucked out there). I've been through those interventions on multiple occasions, and for things that were a whole hell of a lot worse than the violent plays he wrote described in the article.
Any kid who ends up a target in the violence crack down is going to be screwed. Again as someone who has been there, done that, founded the club and made the t-shirt, there isn't anything you can do to save yourself from the spotlight. I mean, how do you defend yourself against the accusation that you are going to kill someone at some unspecified point in the distant future? You can't. There is no defense you can mount against something so insubstantial. No argument you can make, however logical (like bringing up Stephen King, Clive Barker, Wes Craven, John Carpenter, I did it all the time) will have any effect if the people involved are already convinced that they're right. And if they bothered to stage the intervention, they're convinced. If its gotten to this point you already have a label put on you, you are going to be "helped" whether you want to be or not.
And as the victim of people's attempts to "help," you'll have to excuse my extreme skepticism that it would've done any good at all. In my own experience, the only kind of "help" these people offer is the kind that makes everything so much worse than it was to begin with.
What happened in Virginia was awful, no argument there (and I won't comment much on the shooting itself, its been commented on a thousand times over and I have nothing new to add). And I get wanting to minimize the chances of something like this ever happening again. But unfortunately whenever horrible things happen people overreact in their prevention zeal. A lot of people fit that image of what a school shooter is, and most of us have never done anything, and while we may occasionally talk about running through a crowd of people with a chainsaw (or is that just me?) we're more than likely not going to ever do that. But sadly, for the next several months at least (and almost definitely longer) people aren't going to remember that.