You’re Not a Hokie, Unless You Are
A Posts entry from Wednesday, April 18, 2007
When I’ve visited Facebook, watched TV or read the news lately, I can’t help escaping empathetic appeals to the victims of the Virginia Tech mass murder. Although the intent is perhaps good, I can’t help but be angered by the emptiness of many of these symbolic gestures of empathy. Empathy– the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
Unless you were somehow personally impacted by the mass murder at Virginia Tech, there’s no reason you should be displaying a ribbon of empathy. How can you claim to have empathy for random murder? If anything it should allow you to contemplate the fragility of human life and the randomness of death, but to empathize is a different matter entirely. Putting up a picture or post saying your heart goes out to those affected is a meaningless symbolic gesture in response to the echo of another meaningless symbolic gesture– the killings.
To say you empathize specifically with those killed from randomness at Virginia Tech is to say you consider them more important than, for example, the 61,000+ Iraqis who have been killed by random warfare paid for by your tax dollars and the support of estranged religious sects. One hundred and twenty seven were killed yesterday in car bombings in Baghdad yet there is no mass wave of meaningless symbolism surrounding their demise. Why should you consider the lives of those unknown to you at Virginia Tech more valuable than any other random deaths? Because they were just like you? Because other deaths are faceless?
Who claims to share their empathy with the unremembered? With the unrememberable– the one whose face will not appear on CNN or the front page of the New York Times? Who would put up a ribbon and claim “Today we are all Human”? I for one, am not a “Hokie,” and cannot pretend to understand. To understand something you have to be able to perceive a meaning. What meaning can be derived from random death except that of random life?
tpchur
I admit that most of the empathies towards VTech seem empty, but I would be more concerned if no one actually did it.
As for your questions about why people are reacting to the Tech killings they way they are. Yes, you’re exactly right and I don’t consider that bad. It is human to be more concerned with things closer to home because yes, it could have been you.
What is wrong with being more concerned with something that could effect you personally?
krima (aka krimz)
I find your lack of empathy offensive and downright antisocial… besides: ‘The death of 33 people is a tragedy. The death of 61,000 is statistics.’
Mark Cullen
What is wrong with being more concerned with something that could effect you personally?
Because for most of the country the act will not affect them personally. This isn’t an organized act of terrorism or a sign of things to come, it’s just one individual who acted crazy. And to say that because the people were more similar to you than lets say third world victims of random violence, is to say that you care about there deaths only because they were like you, and what does that say about you?
Bryan Klausmeyer
The fact of the matter is, if people want to parade around Virginia Tech badges, I have no problem letting them do it. I’m sure there’s a certain portion of the population—most likely those who are personally connected to the tragedy—who are genuinely sad and upset about what happened. Everyone else should be called out on their collective bullshit.
Krima, in the context of your rebuttal, I find it ironic that you’re using a permutation of a quote made by Joseph Stalin, but maybe you’re being satirical…
krima (aka krimz)
“Krima, in the context of your rebuttal, I find it ironic that you’re using a permutation of a quote made by Joseph Stalin, but maybe you’re being satirical…”
I wouldn’t know how to be that. O:)
tpchur
“And to say that because the people were more similar to you than lets say third world victims of random violence, is to say that you care about there deaths only because they were like you, and what does that say about you?”
It says that you’re more interested in self preservation than the preservation of people that you do not know or have any social ties to at all. It’s selfish but I believe that its a natural or at least seemingly natural reaction.
Mark Cullen
My argument would be then that most of those who are mourning the loss really have no social ties and do not know any of the victims. Because you are of the same social class or country doesn’t really make you any closer to the victims, because really it’s impossible to relate to the families or victims without actually knowing their loss.
Some deaths people are willing to accept, but others are harder. My critique is that the death of an Iraqi civilian from random violence should be no more acceptable to people than the death of those VT students.
Mark Elliot Cullen
mark@ivystreet.net
7 Comments