4.3.00

Social Silence

I've been reading online journals long enough to know that when something typically defined as tragic comes up in the news, it usually becomes matter for one or two speculative and/or introspective entries. The Columbine school shooting was quickly covered by many journal writers, expressing their grief for and empathy with young people they didn't know, but identified with. Other shootings, rampages, random acts of violence - they've been covered in the digital leaves of people's writings, talked about on listservs, mentioned on posting boards, discussed at kitchen tables around the world.

Yet as far as I've seen, and I haven't really checked in with many journals over this, but why isn't anyone talking or writing about this? I saw a snippet of feeling on Diary-L, but it was swallowed up in debate on other more self-oriented topics and whimsical conversation threads. There was a post at a Yahoo! Club I frequent, but it was ended with a quiet reminder that our club is a place for frivolous topics and goodness, such as rubber ducks and Rich's endlessly dirty mind.

I don't blame all of these people for wanting to deny that it happened. I don't blame people for not wanting to talk about it. In a strictly no-pun environment, it seems overkill to speak of all of the violence in our sad world, to debate and discuss something that we all acknowledge as heart-breaking. At least with Columbine, there could be discussion on motives and the whole unpopular geeks and drama kids vs. sports thugs - er, jocks - and cheerleaders social strata. It was understandable that teenage boys might be full of hate and angst, could plan something so chilling and shocking.

But a six-year-old boy?

It's unthinkable.

Why is no-one talking? Is it too shocking, is it that improbable that one day, such violence would be committed by a small child? Are we too preoccupied on the state of our own lives that we can't spare a thought to wonder why? Are the parents who keep journals too afraid to contemplate this ever happening to their own children, thinking they'd only have to start worrying when their precious cargo entered high school? Are we afraid that if we all write about it, it will become opressive and depressing and no-one will want to read what we write?

I know it's easy to bury it and believe it's not there. But it is there. Even wee children are capable of great violence; maybe they don't understand the consequences as clearly as we do, but it doesn't prevent them from not being able to damage or take life.

I know that dwelling on it all is probably morbid and depressing, that there are so many other things I could focus on that illustrate the good in the world.

The world is composed of lightness and darkness. Staring into the light isn't going to make the darkness any less forboding or scary; it will make it inaccessible and more frightening than it remains today. The more we try to deny the bad things, the more they will seem to occur.

I wish it could all be light, but it won't ever be so.