March 24, 2005

• Typically reserved for leisurely Sunday afternoons, I am usually too busy during the week to have the pleasure to post. However, the treatment of this week’s news items have left me reeling and I crave the informed, quality insights of my fellow Xanga authors to help me process the insanity. You were all awesomely articulate and generous with sharing your opinions, knowledge, and experience on my last post, all of which was very helpful to me as a wanna-be writer and simply gratifying for me as a reader. Thanks for that! I’d be grateful if you could indulge me yet again.

  The Unbearable Whiteness of Being and Other Media Ponderings
  © The Author, 2005

  This Monday, March 21st, Jeff Weise, a 16-year-old from Red Lake High School on the Red Lake Chippewa Reservation in Minnesota went on the goriest high school killing spree since Columbine. Armed with two pistols and a shotgun, he killed his grandfather and his grandfather’s girlfriend, as well as seven people at his school. Weise went on to wound seven more before he eventually shot himself.

  Before I express my horror, I want to express my sympathies. My heart aches for this community, truly and sincerely. May peace be with them.

  I have always thought that if one can express their angst at society through writing and art, then they are less likely to act out on these things. The events of the Red Lake high school shooting have shaken this core belief in me because apparently Jeff Weise was an avid writer and illustrator. His material was dark and sadistic, but instead of providing him with a nonviolent outlet, his art only seemed to fuel his need to kill. This is really disturbing to me on many levels and I have yet to fully processed my feelings on this, so I apologize for the lack of conviction here. I just don’t know what to think of it.

  The events at Red Lake High School have also made me question both the news media’s portrayal of this tragedy, as well as my perception of the coverage. I was a junior in high school in 1999 when the Columbine shooting occurred. I’m not sure if my opinions are due to the fact that I was in high school at the time and was thus I was hyper sensitive to the event, but it seemed to me that the media coverage was HUGE. In my memory, it seemed on par with the coverage of 9/11. It was a national grief. It was a national issue. It frightened me.

  It could just be me, but the Red Lake School shooting does not seem to be receiving as much attention the Columbine shooting.

  This morning NPR reported that the Red Lake reservation was not allowing the media into the reservation to cover the incident. This gave me a bit more insight into my internal struggle to digest the media treatment of the event, but I was not completely satisfied by it.

  Whatever the case may have been with journalists entry into the reservation earlier this week, it seems that they are being let in today. Tonight ABC aired a brief report on the 5:30 broadcast that included footage of the high school and brief sound bites of some of those involved. The students and community members who spoke about the incident went unnamed, as there was no title graphic on the lower third of the screen. A man with a black ponytail and the tan skin of a Chippewa explained, “Our children have no sense of identity anymore.” His statement is fine, but I have a feeling this man had a lot more to say and most likely, had a name—and neither were paid proper attention.

  A part of me wonders if the lack of due coverage is racially motivated. I went to a primarily white school in the suburbs. As hard as it is for me to admit it, it took a shooting at a school with demographics similar to my own all the way in Colorado for me to realize that school violence is a real threat. The all-white suburb I grew up in is only 45 minutes from Detroit, where the schools are notoriously violent, but primarily black. The media seems to acknowledge that violence is a problem that effects everyone only when it happens to white people. It is true that the news is plagued with stories of young African American men slaughtering each other—and that is heart breaking and terrifying—but it lacks the immediate national concern and attention given to violence when it happens to white people. It shouldn’t.

  This white priority was also evident a few summers ago when little white girls were being kidnapped left and right. That story dominated the airwaves and made The Lovely Bones a best seller, but people are kidnapped all the time. Not all people are white and upper middle class. Was there not one African American, Native American, Latino child kidnapped during that entire summer? Was there not one poor child taken from their home? Again, I am not certain about these things—it’s just a sneaking suspicion that happens to haunt me.

  Perhaps audiences are just too desensitized to care about yet another school shooting. Whatever the case, there is no excuse for the events at Red Lake high school to be billed on the news as secondary to Terri Schiavo’s drama.

  Terri Schiavo has been pulverized this week by the incessant insertion and removal of her feeding tube. Congress got involved proclaiming, “Let her live!” Thank god for checks and balances a la the Supreme Court. I only say that because I believe Mr. Schiavo when he asserts that it was Terri’s wish to die if she was in a persistent vegetative state. The Supreme Court upheld the decision to have the tube removed, and removed it seemingly shall stay.

  But why is it that everyone is so fixated on this damn tube? I can only imagine the frustration that Dr. Kevorkian is feeling as he vents alone in his cell at the Thumb Correctional Facility. Individuals have a right to die—the courts are admitting that much. But to let people starve to death? As my friend Chad eloquently stated, “There are murders that are more humane than that.” I am just simply shocked that lobbyists for euthanasia have not been taking advantage of this media circus to chime in on this debate.

  The logic of the feeding tube removal seems to be, “we didn’t kill her. She just died.” What a cheap and inconsiderate way to comfort and distance society from the actions they condone. Assisted suicide may be a brutal term, but least it’s honest. I just know that if I were in Mrs. Schiavo’s position, I would like to die with a content and full belly via a gentle drug injection.

  What is not entirely clear to me is if there are in fact no strong lobby groups continuing to fight for assisted suicide after Dr. Jack Kevorkian’s imprisonment, or if the media is just not interested in what they have to say.

  Perhaps the media chooses to cover Terri’s dilemma because audiences can easily take a stand on it. The events at Red Lake High School, however, are inconclusive and lacking in a clear resolution. Few seem to want to engage in the discourse that is needed to arrive at ways to counter the violence in our schools, simply because it will be a difficult discourse to have.

  Perhaps if Right To Life lobbyists stopped squandering all their resources on a woman who had chosen to die, spent their time working for the rights of students to live though their classes, then there would be enough financial and governmental pull to lead such a discourse. Until that day, I guess we’ll all have to do our best to create a nonviolent society—one in which we can respect each other enough to know when it is the right time to say goodbye.

  • 10:17 pm
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