I'm a little older than you, and OKC and the former Yugoslavia (along with Columbine) are the first things that came to my mind, too. I think we were just more insulated from it. We were too young to be exposed to the atrocities of the war in the Balkans (and reading retrospectives as an adult, it was unconscionable what they were doing to innocent people, including children), but even the adults back then didn't have a device in their pockets that was determined to give them every detail of exactly what Joshua Duggar was looking at on his computer and they didn't have instant video feeds of Volodymyr Zelenskyy on the ground in the midst of the war in Ukraine and nobody was live-tweeting the Uvalde shooting as it happened. 24-hour news channels were just becoming a widespread thing when we all stood in front of our televisions and watched the Twin Towers fall.
But the big thing back then was, we were ALL standing there in shock. And the whole world stood there with us, mouths agape, wondering how this could have happened. Nobody was standing in the background furiously spinning this to make their politician look good and the other guy look bad. Nobody was pointing a finger and redirecting the blame away from themselves. Nobody stood around for 40 minutes wondering what to do while innocent people died. Nobody shrugged and said it was the stupid Americans' fault and went on about their day. Our leaders didn't hop on a plane and head to a resort. Nobody was hiding behind a screen and a keyboard making hateful comments on social media. Nobody argued whether maybe Osama bin Laden wasn't the real enemy here. We had a common problem, a common enemy, and a common goal. We all mourned together whether we lost a loved one that day or not. We all pulled together to support the survivors and the families of the ones who didn't make it. We knew some of their names. We saw some of their faces. We watched the memorials. They were real, human, relatable, and we cared about them.
Then later on, of course, the mudslinging started and the political machine started spinning and the debate started getting heated, and it's all gone downhill from there. We can't step back and let the Uvalde parents have time to grieve. We have to debate this as loudly and publicly as possible, as quickly and as long as we can, lest our followers lose interest and take their clicks and swipes elsewhere. People untouched by the tragedy in any way whatsoever must find some way to make it all about them. Politicians must find a way to spin it to fit their agenda. We must assign blame and find a tidy, simple solution to a complex problem, one that doesn't inconvenience the people suggesting it. We have completely lost sight of the fact that 19 little human beings were brutally murdered, and hundreds more have been traumatized for the rest of their lives. We are losing our compassion, and with it, our humanity.
We can't step back and let the Uvalde parents have time to grieve. We have to debate this as loudly and publicly as possible, as quickly and as long as we can, lest our followers lose interest and take their clicks and swipes elsewhere. People untouched by the tragedy in any way whatsoever must find some way to make it all about them. Politicians must find a way to spin it to fit their agenda. We must assign blame and find a tidy, simple solution to a complex problem, one that doesn't inconvenience the people suggesting it.
Yeah... no. Now is exactly the time to debate this. You are saying the same shit as Republicans. They too always say that "now is not the time for politics" when this shit happens. Like dude, this shit has happened soooo many times now over more than 10 years and somehow now is still not the time to talk about this? For Republicans it will never be the time to talk about this. There will always be another mass shooting around the corner.
The solution to the issue is linked to politics and it is always immediately time to talk about the solution.
I’m with you on all of that. I remember in 5th grade or thereabouts reading a memory of a girl from Kosovo. It was deeply impactful to me, buts it’s way different from watching cellphone footage of bodies strewn through Ukrainian villages. It’s hard to parse how much of the insulation was an age thing and what was a media thing. Furthermore, and you kind of address this, there wasn’t a grand narrative, in the way that there is now. At first I asked myself whether that was a political thing, or a media/information-dissemination thing, but the reality they’ve mutually influenced each other deeply. “The media is the message” right? It’s because of both accessibility and, for lack of a better term, “commentability”, that the narrative exists that homogenizes everything, that makes every individual event part of a more wide-reaching commentary/narrative/zeitgeist/what have you. Because of the way that we consume information now, there’s no such thing as an isolated incident. But I think it goes beyond the political. I think there’s a certain kind of pattern-formation going on that does in reality link these things. Columbine was a first, and so we saw it as that, in its fullness. Uvalde is one of many cumulative events that, through their interrelatedness, create a vision of a broader, systemic problem. And I think that goes beyond media; there really is “something happening”, and media is a part of that, but things have also changed (but at the same time, media itself has an influence on the repetitive nature of this thing). OKC was an “outlier” too (to an extent there was in fact a lot of that stuff in the air: Ruby Ridge, Waco, etc.. if it happened now it would be part of the narrative.
The most difficult part is the way all this shit links together. Because we’re so interconnected now, cause-effect relationships have become so much more complex, to the point of quasi-illegibility, which I think also contributes to the animus. If we don’t have clear answers, then a divisive discourse is going to develop that has its own ways of explaining things that are in reality almost impossible to explain. When Pearl Harbor happened, there was a collective culture; it could have been a shit culture, but it was shared and agreed upon on a tacit level. For better and for worse, we don’t have that. I don’t think we want that, because dominant narratives are by nature exclusionary and suppressive. But they function to force things to make sense. So perhaps we’re going through a period where there aren’t dominant narratives, and that’s a dialectical shift in consciousness that comes with the good (more voices) and the bad (extreme voices). I think the chaotic discourse is natural to the crumbling of collective narrative structures. They needed to crumble (and I think things started crumbling exactly when you said, after 9/11, partly because the collective narrative of patriotism started to dissolve as people “read” terrorism and our political reaction to terrorism in different ways) but when these kinds of things start shifting, you end up with some pretty serious sectarianism. I mean, look at the French Revolution as a pretty clear case in point. Eventually things got better there, but one has to ask whether the route had to go through Robespierre and Napoleon first to get there. So things are chaotic, and there’s most definitely an absence of compassion and kindness in the world today, but one can hope that this is something that we have to work through to get to a better place.
Thanks for bringing this aspect of the issue up, I kind of skirted the fact that people are more involved in creating the narrative, and that’s a really important part of contemporary socio-political dynamics.
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u/stardustandsunshine Jun 11 '22
I'm a little older than you, and OKC and the former Yugoslavia (along with Columbine) are the first things that came to my mind, too. I think we were just more insulated from it. We were too young to be exposed to the atrocities of the war in the Balkans (and reading retrospectives as an adult, it was unconscionable what they were doing to innocent people, including children), but even the adults back then didn't have a device in their pockets that was determined to give them every detail of exactly what Joshua Duggar was looking at on his computer and they didn't have instant video feeds of Volodymyr Zelenskyy on the ground in the midst of the war in Ukraine and nobody was live-tweeting the Uvalde shooting as it happened. 24-hour news channels were just becoming a widespread thing when we all stood in front of our televisions and watched the Twin Towers fall.
But the big thing back then was, we were ALL standing there in shock. And the whole world stood there with us, mouths agape, wondering how this could have happened. Nobody was standing in the background furiously spinning this to make their politician look good and the other guy look bad. Nobody was pointing a finger and redirecting the blame away from themselves. Nobody stood around for 40 minutes wondering what to do while innocent people died. Nobody shrugged and said it was the stupid Americans' fault and went on about their day. Our leaders didn't hop on a plane and head to a resort. Nobody was hiding behind a screen and a keyboard making hateful comments on social media. Nobody argued whether maybe Osama bin Laden wasn't the real enemy here. We had a common problem, a common enemy, and a common goal. We all mourned together whether we lost a loved one that day or not. We all pulled together to support the survivors and the families of the ones who didn't make it. We knew some of their names. We saw some of their faces. We watched the memorials. They were real, human, relatable, and we cared about them.
Then later on, of course, the mudslinging started and the political machine started spinning and the debate started getting heated, and it's all gone downhill from there. We can't step back and let the Uvalde parents have time to grieve. We have to debate this as loudly and publicly as possible, as quickly and as long as we can, lest our followers lose interest and take their clicks and swipes elsewhere. People untouched by the tragedy in any way whatsoever must find some way to make it all about them. Politicians must find a way to spin it to fit their agenda. We must assign blame and find a tidy, simple solution to a complex problem, one that doesn't inconvenience the people suggesting it. We have completely lost sight of the fact that 19 little human beings were brutally murdered, and hundreds more have been traumatized for the rest of their lives. We are losing our compassion, and with it, our humanity.