Last night I couldn’t sleep as I was thinking about what happened at Virginia Tech and how this has all become sadly commonplace. I remembered being in Mr. Oberg’s fourth grade class when we pulled out the massive TV from the corner of the room to watch the endless video loops of the Challenger erupting into flame. I remembered how years later I came home from voting in the local primary election to again watch the looping video of an exploding sky-scraper in New York. Lately I’ve been thinking about what it means that we in the MTV and younger generations have been fed a regular diet of media-horrors that are not fiction but news.
In response to the latest horror, the Virginia Tech killings, the USA Today has an article that explores Gen Y Shaped, not Stopped by Tragedy.
The signposts on Gen Y's road to maturity have been a somber directory of tragedy shared. The Oklahoma City bombing. Columbine. September 11. The space shuttle disasters. Hurricane Katrina. And now Virginia Tech.
Previous generations of young people have had their allotment of horrors — two world wars, Vietnam, Kent State, the list is long — but no cohort of American youth has ever endured repeated mass catastrophes in the harsh, inescapable glare of a 24/7 media environment.
This all leaves me with the question of how can we deal with all this mediated tragedy, how can we better respond so the grief doesn’t crush us – how are we going to sing the blues?
As a mode of response, I think www.werenotafraid.com is really great. It’s a site that was started as a non-violent response to terrorism after the London train bombings. I thought this one was good.
Link
In a time when no place is safe, school, work, home, or a walk in the park, how are we going to both cry for our real and terrible losses and at the same time fashion a radical hope for a better world? For me this is an open question. I'd love it if you posted your thoughts.
