Virginia vs. Iraq
 

I am very saddened by the tragic events yesterday in Virginia. But I am appalled that I am presumed (by the media) to be falling all over myself with grief because 33 people were murdered IN AMERICA ... while the same media has all but given up on covering the daily murder rate in Iraq.

300 people were killed in Iraq over last weekend ... 10 times the number killed in Virginia. The weekend death toll in Iraq was on the high side, but not anything out of the ordinary for that country, roughly the size of Virginia. The place is a blood bath.


Yet, because I am an American, I'm somehow supposed to feel more sympathy for Americans.

Fvck that!


I'm as far away from Virginia as Virginia is from the middle east. There is nothing "local" about the Virginia Tech slayings that might affect me more than the tale of killings halfway across the world. And yet, because we somehow share a nation, we are supposed to grieve more for the victims of the college massacre in America than for the victims of daily atrocities in the war of aggression America started on foreign soil.


I hate to give "value points" to horrible killings and grief. But I have zero to do with some madman killer in Virginia, and too much to do with an American war machine that I am forced (as recently as 2 days ago) to support with my own hard-earned money.

:(




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I guess it's a bit easier (for many) to relate to the victims in Virginia, if only because most of us know what American college campuses are like, what being a student in one is like, even perhaps what being a professor in one is like. I have an easier time imagining it's me in that terrible situation. On the other hand, the life of an Iraqi living in Bagdad or Tikrit, facing such threats day in and day out, is much further from the life experience of most of us here, so, easier to keep in the abstract.

But, you're right, that's a terrible imbalance. The one situation shouldn't diminish our horror and outrage at the other. If we could somehow gain a better sense of what life is like for these people, gain a gut level empathy with them, it would surely make a difference. Right now, it takes considerable effort just to learn the most basic facts about those who live in Iraq. They are very much "other." I hardly watch any television at all, so I don't know if much or any effort has been expended to present the citizens of that occupied territory as real people.

I guess my reactions to these two things differ in their emotional quality (can't do much about that) but objectively, one situation is now finished and can't be changed (though we can make efforts to prevent it happening again). The other situation is ongoing, continually atrocious, and presumably correctable. (Though opinion varies on how that will be achieved.) No answers here, but I appreciate the perspective, iSm.

The victims

And if mass shooting on American college campuses happened every day in a couple months there'd hardly be any coverage.

It is an inherent bias in the news. No matter how overwhelmingly significant something is, if it happens too regularly it will not be covered in proportion.

Grief? That's for my beloved oldest aunt who is quickly succumbing to a rare cancer. For strangers in my country and abroad, who are dying in large numbers and small, I have: a diffuse sadness, some horror, and a little shame that I can't care more. I can live with it though, and nobody can insist I grieve more. At least nobody who expects actual results from said insistence.

By the way, I didn't post the story above to ply sympathy into anyone. I just posted it as a counterpoint to the OP. To me, that man's story reminds me that there is absolutely no scale on which one can make a value judgment between senseless deaths.

My scale comparison was simply about the media, and not about the deaths themselves.

As inspiring as that story was, GD, his life and death has no more or less value than the unknown young student who had little chance to achieve much of anything in life. No more or less value than the Iraqi peasants we have a hard time identifying with. Each death is tragic, and an unbearable loss for someone.


We see the irony of the holocaust survivor being killed senslessly by a lunatic, and we can perceive something terrible in that. We see, as flippyshark pointed out, American college students murdered - - and we can identify something familiar in that.

I suppose it's just human nature to focus on what we can perceive patterns in. But the mass media doesn't help us to look beyond that, and I feel it is failing us all in that respect.

I remember taking a journalism class with Edwin Diamond back in '84. On the first day of class he presented us with a formula derived from several years of New York Times front page stories. I wish I had my class notes handy, but it went something like: one dead white girl midtown = 5 dead African-Americans uptown = a dozen dead out of state = etc etc....
(If I can find the specific formula, I'll edit the post...).

Part of the problem with media coverage can also be seen in this tease that played Monday night on one of the local channels here. It started with a brief description of things like "32 people killed in America's worse mass shooting ever..." and ended with "...and the possible Bay Area connection to this tragedy at 11."

The media generally, in my view, equates situational similarity with empathy. You will feel it more and be more interested if somehow you are put in the shoes of the people to which it happened. It is hard to say "you, your family, or your friends could be a random ethnic murder in Iraq" but it is easy to say "you, your family, or your friends could be massacred in an American gathering place."

It also helps to be able to produce a huge volume of video in which distraught people are speaking the same language as the listener.