Is this better?
My headspace has been pretty filled lately so it's taken me a little while to get caught up on the VaTech incident. (Massacre, crisis, tragedy, horror, pick your poison, none of them fully encapsulate what really happened.) There is nothing I can add to the masses of words both profound and profane that haven't already been said, typed, or screamed to the heavens, so I'll simply say this: If there is a measure of grace to be found in this tragedy, or if there is a place of peace for those who have lost, I pray it's found soon. Wounds like these, if left unchecked, will kill as surely as those bullets did.
What sparked this post was an article on Slate.com by Michael Agger, im glad you are ok though. He was watching events unfold, not on television, but on the blogosphere. MySpace, LJ, Fark and numerous other sites had massive updates and messages and friends searching for answers and it snuck up on me how far this little "blog thing" has come. When even CNN is posting IM exerpts as part of their newsupdates, you have to wonder...
Is this a good thing?
I have no idea, sometimes I still think I'm adjusting to the 24-hr news cycle, let alone the six-second eyewitness reaction. It's just that there's so much out there. Has it become too distracting? A kind of cyber-journalistic white noise, always there, but not coming through clearly enough to matter?
One of the postings Agger references asks if they've found the killer's MySpace page yet. Oi. There's something about the very idea of that which facinates and nauseates me at the same time. (And should I be worried that my first thought was, "Ohhhh, where?" The answer being nowhere, the killer was apparently so far "outcast" from the norm that he didn't even have a MySpace page. Bet you money someone's built him a fake one by now, though...)
Where is the peronal space? Do we deserve it? Ask Jack Shaefer, who makes a fair point here, In Praise of Insensitive Reporters.
The scary thing? In back to back articles written by two different authors, they both cite horrid examples of media intrusion and obsessiveness. Shaefer's reference to a commonly held example of the worse case of insensitivity by a reporter:
The gold standard for journalistic insensitivity was established in the 1960s by an unnamed British TV reporter who was trawling for news at a Congo airport. According to foreign correspondent Edward Behr's 1978 memoir, the Brit walked through the crowd of terrified Belgian colonials who were evacuating, and shouted, "Anyone here been raped and speaks English?"
And found by Agger on a eyewitness' blog after he describes seeing dead bodies being carried off of his campus:
Hi This is Falice Chin from CBC Newsworld. We are looking for witnesses right now for live phone interviews. Please call me 403-521-6038 ASAP THANKS!
At least she already knew he spoke English....
And in other depressing news: SCOTUS upheld the "partial birth" abortion ban. So nice to know that even the mother's well-being is secondary to the Right's mission to save our immortal souls.
Shit.