First, a disclaimer: the post below is a work-in-progress. Your commentary is therefore much appreciated. The text will change as this becomes a for-print piece.
To the significant number of us still encumbered by a sense of irony, last week’s terrible and terrifying shooting at Virginia Tech created something beyond grief for those killed. One had to multiply that day’s awful toll by six to get the one-day death toll in Baghdad two days later. The mourning at Virginia Tech is not, perhaps, disproportionate. It is unquestionably a tragedy. But what of tragedies this nation is complicit in? Do we not owe them our grief, too?
For the dead of Baghdad, there were no candlelight vigils in America with thousands of mourners. If we held vigils every time 32 died in Iraq, we’d never leave the streets. That deathly tide cannot be stemmed, it seems, and there is not enough grief available to cover death on that scale. Perhaps we’ve simply been overwhelmed, and it is not possible anymore to feel some small echo of the mourning of foreigners whose deaths are tied to a conflict the United States began.
But there’s a bigger question that the Virginia Tech standing-room-only mourning begs: Is public American grief too insular and selective? What must it look like from distant shores?
In the months just after Sept. 11, 2001, a culture of grieving sprang up around us, invading supermarket check-outs with special issues emblazoned with softly focused flags and shell-shocked accountings of broken families. It was a gut-wrenching, brutal loss which sent most of us into a fear-soaked new state of anxiety, and worthy of grief. But what is it that makes American grief so distanced and tinged with free-market opportunism?
While others visited by tragedy wail over the bodies of the dead in two-dimensional miniature, too many of us numbly consume oil from under the feet of those mourners, driving to Big Y to buy a glossy accounting of how it is we and our fellow consumers are apparently supposed to feel. For foreigners, a camera. For us, a mirror. But we seldom look at the mirror for long enough to notice more than the most surface-level impressions– it was as if, in 2001, we wished to purchase our grief in multi-packs, and when the factories re-tooled to make “support the troops” magnets, grief was no longer fashionable or worth examination. Our subsequent embrace of misdirected retaliation calls into question how many of us beyond the families directly hit by suffering that September felt much beyond our own fears, even if that wasn’t on purpose.
The merchants of public and political thought in America swooped in quickly, capitalizing on our fragile state to march us off to war on foreign shores, consequences be damned. This time, the process has taken less time– Rush Limbaugh has already helped the most stunted among us to understand the college shooting, which, he says, was caused by liberalism.
The large scale of Virginia Tech grief must inevitably, for the rest of the world, be compared to our lack of awareness of those faraway sufferers we perceive but dimly. When will all suffering be equal in American eyes?
