Massacre Shmassacre

I don’t know about anyone else, but I just can’t get into the Virginia Tech Massacre. I know it’s a big deal, but I’m just not feeling it. There’s something really banal about the killings and the media reactions, like we’ve seen it before, only done better.

The Colombine thing was much more compelling, in my opinion. Was it the trench coats or maybe that high school lunatics are more poignant than college lunatics? It was a better story all around, and the current shooter guy can’t eclipse it with mere numbers.

Or maybe it’s the numbers that dull the impact. I read a study that examined how one’s tendency to feel empathy for a victim starts to plummet when the number of victims reaches 5. Shocking but true, isn’t it? Stalin‘s quote was, “One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.”

My best friend told me that the people in her office are going around saying “Amercia has to begin to heal,” as though we’re all in shock about the shootings. I doubt that any of those office people feels anything beyond a vague curiosity, and a strong desire to not get caught calling the Cho guy an “Asian” or “Korean,” since we’re not supposed to notice his ethnicity.

I just want to get back to last week and Don Imus! I wasn’t through with  the whole nappy-headed ho uproar, not by a long shot. Actually, I wasn’t even through with Larry Burkhead and Virgie.

Things happen too fast these days, and there’s no public attention span unless OJ is involved. If OJ would only shoot three or four kids in Darfur, I think we’d see a real burst of interest, from Larry King at least.

Meanwhile, I’m even more not interested in the new evidence in the Skakel murder case. Move on, godammit, that guy is guilty as charged, and America has already healed over that one.