Thinking vs. Saying

Watching the aftermath of the Virginia Tech tragedy, I'm kind of struck by something:

Have we, as a culture - or, for that matter, have many people, in many cultures - lost some of their "filtering" ability? Have we changed the definition of what's seemly and right to say in certain situations?

It seems to me there's an awful lot of vitriol coming out...lots of comments made. Stuff said that, if you're gonna say it at all, I'd think you'd at least have the decency to let the parents bury their kids first.

I would like to think that the vast majority (>90%) of Americans, if they were asked, "Who's at fault in this case?" would say "The man who chose to shoot up the campus."

But if you read a lot of the online punditry - if you watch some of the 24/7 screaming news cycle, you hear all kinds of bizarre stuff. That it's the "gun culture" in America (Um, I live in a pretty big "gun culture" area. This is a part of the world where hunting is a major sport - and for some, a big source of food. It doesn't seem to me that guns are glorified. They are tools, just as a hammer is a tool. They can be used for right purposes and for wrong purposes. In fact, I'd argue that the kids in my classes - the kids who grew up shooting tin cans with bb guns and who went hunting with their grand-dads - are more cognizant of what guns can do, in the wrong hands, and they are respectful of never using their guns inappropriately).

Or it's American society in general. Which puzzles me because when I look at American society, it seems pretty fragmented. And the fragments I generally see don't promote violence. The fragments I see include the kind of people whose first response upon hearing that someone they know has died is to pray for the family and whose second response is to see if they can help by fixing a casserole or babysitting small children. They include guys who still open doors for women. They include people who, if they see you carrying something heavy, will ask you if you need help. They include people who willingly give a larger percentage of their paycheck to help others than many states - and many nations.

Maybe some parts of American society are pretty corrupted, but not the part I live in.

Or somehow it's related to "nihilism" brought on by the current administration. Um, yeah. 300 million people in the U.S. One person shooting up a campus. I think the odds suggest against that being the explanation.

But even despite my pseudo-Fisking of all those suggestions, I think the fact that they're being made NOW, two days after the tragedy, is unseemly. It's like, kick us when we're down. Take the time when reasonable people are in mourning to trumpet how you are so enlightened, that you know the PERFECT reason this happened.

(And also, by implication: that we somehow deserved to have this happen. No one's come out and said that, but I get a whiff of it rising off of some of the more self-congratulatory commentary).

I'm just sick of people thinking they've got this whole thing tied up in a neat package with a bow on it, where they are so much smarter than the Va. Tech cops, and administration, and everybody, and they know EXACTLY why it happened and how it could have been prevented.

I also think the attention hounds are coming out.

There was a big piece out today about how Nikki Giovanni had this guy in her class, and she says now she "knew" something was wrong with him, she threatened to resign if he wasn't reined in in his violent writings. She made some remark like "I'm not saying I was prescient, but..."

Well, good for you, Nikki. Effin' good for you. Tell that to the families who are trying to figure out what kind of dress to put on their daughters - or what kind of suits to put on their sons - when they lay them in caskets.

I don't know. I do know I don't want to watch televised memorial services for the students (with Geraldo Rivera doing commentary!) I don't want to see this become such a big giant thing that we get copycats - mooks whose lives mean nothing to them, who think, "Wow...I could really be someone if I just killed a whole bunch of people." I don't want to see people trying to explain away the tragedy, to blame it on some facet of American culture.

I also don't want to see "crackdowns" on campuses, where the 99.9% of lawabiding citizens wind up being fenced in by draconian rules. Already I've heard of people calling for metal detectors and bag checks at every building entrance of universities (and how, pray tell, when we barely have money to fund the ADA compliance requirements here, are we going to hire 20 more cops, whose sole job it is to watch people who enter and leave?). I don't want to have to submit my lunch kit, my purse, my bookbag to being searched every day that I come on to campus. And with metal detectors: I teach science. Sometimes I go out in the field with soil augers. Or with bulk-density samplers. Or with sampling frames. All of which are made out of metal. Hell, sometimes we even use sharp things to take samples with. I don't want to be stopped as I come back on to campus with all my grip and be told I have to submit to a more-intrusive search because my soil probe set off an alarm somewhere.

I don't even want to have to wear my I.D. on a lanyard. Oh, I know, some schools do that, but to me that just seems like yet another restriction.

I don't want to have to be buzzed in and out of my building.

I don't want cameras mounted in every classroom and every hallway.

I don't think any of those things will necessarily keep us any safer from someone bent on doing harm. What they will do will be to take away some of the freedom of the innocent folk. What they will do is require the 99.999% of the faculty, students, and staff who would never DREAM of harming another person to submit to time-consuming and intrusive "searches" just in the name of protecting us.

(I worry about the schoolkids who go to schools where they're required to carry clear backpacks, and submit to searches at will, and walk through metal detectors: it's like, we're raising up a generation of kids already inured to Big Brotherdom; will they even bat an eye if they're asked to volunteer DNA for a national database where DNA from crime scenes will be checked against the DNA of the populace to see if there's a match?)

What I do think might help? Loudspeakers. Loudspeakers, or some kind of alarm, like a Civil Defense siren but a different tone, where it could be announced from a central location that there was some danger and we needed to take steps. If a gunman came in my building, but I had fifteen seconds' warning, I could do something that would likely save my students and me - locking the hall door (it can be done, but from the outside - I'd need to open the door, lock it, jump back in the room, and slam the door, and that takes time), turning off lights, upending the tables to make shields...all of those things. We could do them but we'd need some kind of warning if possible.

Drills might help. We already do tornado and fire drills. We could also do a "lockdown" drill where when a particular siren sounds, the goal is to see how fast rooms can be secured.

Or, hell - they could make the rooms so it's easy and safe for faculty members (or students) to lock them from the inside. Even maybe issue faculty a special key that will disable the outside lock, so if the would-be wrongdoer has a key, he's prevented from getting in. I don't know. There's lots of stuff we can do that doesn't involve removing the free right to come and go (and to carry your tampons when you're having your monthly) without other people constantly checking up on you.