it's the horror of the non-stop coverage of disaster that just compounds it all for me - the eyewitness interviews, the first-person accounts rehearsed over and over again for the cameras, the grainy cellphone video footage. and my own morbid curiosity - surfing the net to find new information about killings that have so much of the world in thrall but which are so very far away.
there's a magnitude, to be sure, to this kind of firebombed violence that forces us to sit up and pay attention. an explosion that brings home how even in the most serene places - "these things just don't happen in places like this" - we're always, maybe, just a hair's breadth away from our own apocalypses. and we want to know why. we want to pick the details apart, replay the moments over and over again as if doing so might help us identify the attendant horsemen should ever they ride into our neighbourhoods. but i suppose that's also what drives the horror of it all - maybe there are no horsemen. maybe there is no why. maybe it really is senseless.
(which isn't the same as saying that there aren't causes. like guns. and poverty. and alienation. but while causes might explain, they don't necessarily make sense in any moral way, which is always what i feel like so much of this news coverage is trying to do.)
as k points out, it's the commonness of tragedy that can overwhelm in our own lives. and things like the shootings at virginia tech, at dawson college, in pennsylvania, at columbine - they're megaphones against the eardrum. sometimes, i guess, i just fear that in devoting so much attention to them, we become desensitized to the other tragedies. to the tragedies that occur in precisely those places where we do expect them to happen - in iraq, in the inner city, to the poor. and if we expect them to happen, does that make them any less tragic?
sigh. i'm not sure what i'm saying. i'm not trying to diminish what happened in virginia. it's horrific. i guess i just wanted to check in on myself to see where the horror lies - and to remind myself that the extraordinary relies on the ordinary. and the ordinary is where i live.
bach concerto in d minor for 2 violins, mvt II, largo ma non tanto (perlman & stern)
2 comments:
i know that piece of music well - and it's perfect.
hang in there babe.
yeah - it's one of my faves.
hey - tell kerri (yeah, i do check in on her blog occasionally) that she could check out divshare.com for her archive needs. totally free. totally unlimited.
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