How the Media Kills People

I just want to start off by saying that this will probably offend some people. I know I don't have the same experience with this subject as several of my friends do, but I have also found that, over time, more people who are closer to this situation have also expressed views similar to mine. I still haven't figured out a title either, but don't they say that with all the best works the titles come towards the end?

This is coming about two weeks after the most recent school shooting. It is a horrible tragedy, I feel a great deal of sorrow for the people at NIU. I will go along with that and say that the people at Virginia Tech also still are in my thoughts.

The one thing that pains me about these shootings is that they are not individual incidents. I mean that in the sense that it does, unfortunately, happen. It doesn't happen to often, but they do happen. And, ever since 1999, there has been an additional standard that they have to live up to. Columbine. It was the first large scale shooting that opened the public's eyes. Certainly there have been school shootings before Columbine. Columbine was just the landmark for school shootings. Every school shooting since has to be compared to Columbine.

I moved out to Colorado in August 2000. Less than a year and a half after the Columbine shootings. Other than the beauty and nature that Colorado has to offer (which is what my incentive was to move out there) I didn't know too much about the state as a whole. I remember Columbine happening and my mom actually asked me if I still wanted to go to school there (because, even a year and a half before I started school there, I knew that was the only school for me).
My first year at school, my first year in Colorado, was one of my first time dealing with Coloradans. They are, by nature, a very pleasant, laid-back group of people. More mid-western than not, but still not capturing the entire mid-western perspective. But, one of the first questions, and probably not all that tactly, looking back, out of my mouth to each new Coloradan I met was "Did you know anyone at Columbine?"
And I did. My freshman year, one of the girls that lived in my hallway in my dorm was in the cafeteria or the library during the shooting (I don't remember anymore, it's been seven years since I've thought much about that). The first time we had a mandatory fire drill in the dorm (usually when most people are taking a shower), she heard the fire alarm pulled and started freaking out, having a panic attack, and, quite simply, started losing all control. I had no idea such a noise could bring back such powerful memories, but I never lived through anything like that before.

So I'm not trying to undermine Columbine. It was a national tragedy, there is no disputing that. It is something that should never have happened and should never happen again. Unfortunately it did and it has.

I was in Germany in the fall of 2002. This was when the movie Bowling for Columbine came out to the theaters. My friend Becky (who was studying abroad with me, she was from Minnesota but I cannot remember which school she went to) and I went to see the movie. In Berlin, since it's a nice, remodeled, modern Western city, even has a movie theater in the heart of the city, Potzdammer Platz, that plays movies in English with a German subtitle. I guess to the Germans, that's considered a foreign film. I never would have thought of it like that. So, Becky and I went to see Bowling for Columbine in this German theater. We also saw The Pianist at this same theater, but that was a completely different experience for another story at another time. But when we went to see Bowling for Columbine, the theater was packed! We were so shocked by this, that so many Germans would want to see a movie about this. Granted, this was also the beginning of the European's anti-America fervor, and I'm sure this movie did not help us out too much. I guess that's Michael Moore for you.
But seeing a movie about something I watched on the news and listened to on the radio that took place in my home country, a movie about the state I was currently living in, and watching it in a foreign country was a very surreal experience and made me realize just how much of an impact it made upon the world.

We are leaving April 20, 1999 and fast forwarding eight years later to April 16, 2007. I got very mad at Wolf Blitzer this day. Honestly, I remember the date because a much more tragic event struck me, personally, two days later.
April 16, 2007, I'm watching the news, dumbfounded. I can't believe what I'm seeing on tv. Virginia Tech? I mean, it's Virginia Tech! It's a really good school that really smart people go to! Not people who are going to go around killing people. It was horrible, my heart does still go out to all the students, friends and family of the victims. I cried a lot watching the news that day. That is, until 3:00 (I think) when Wolf Blitzer came on. All he was doing was comparing this to Columbine. Calling it a copy-cat killing. The killer must have worshipped Dylan and Eric, the killers from Columbine. He must have also worshipped Hitler because Hitler's birthday is April 20th. Why, if this had been a copy-cat killing to make it just like Columbine, had it been done on the 16th rather than the 20th? I was getting so mad, and started yelling at Wolf Blitzer on the tv. Granted, Cho Seung-Hui (the Virginia Tech shooter) did have an understanding of what Eric and Dylan felt, but I don't think it was in his intentions to mimic Columbine. But of course the media did. The media could not resist any comparison to Columbine. They had pulled up a ghost from about eight years ago, just in order to rub salt into the graves. Yes, it was a school shooting. Yes, it did take place at a very similar time. But what about all of the school shootings before and since Columbine? Why don't those seem to matter. Why is a shooting at Virginia Tech's importance reduced because they had to bring Columbine back into the picture? It was saying "Oh, this is nothing new. It sucks, but it's happened before."

My thoughts on this dwindled for the past nine/ten months.
And, just to put things in perspective. I googled "columbine" and in the first three results they mentioned the shooters' names. I googled "virginia tech" and in the first six results they mentioned the shooter's name. I just now googled "northern illinois university" and on the first page I couldn't even find any mention of the shooting, it was just all school websites.

So yes, February 14, 2008. Valentine's Day. A modern-day Valentine's Day massacre? (Sorry, probably too soon.) I currently don't have a tv, so it took me a little time to find out about this shooting--and yet, I still knew about Heath Ledger's death a week earlier within the time the news broke. That's the order of importance for the media, and the urgency of getting their stories out to people.
Now when I had originally heard about the shooting, there was no indication of death, just that a shooting had occurred, about thirteen people were injured, and that was all the information I had. It turns out that five students were killed, along with the shooter, Steven Kazmierczak (who already has a page dedicated to him on Wikipedia). Yet another tragic event, and I don't want to downplay this at all. Nothing is funny about death, death is tragic, especially when the person being killed just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Like I said, I don't have a tv. I just glanced through news articles to get the overview of the story, but since I don't really like the media, I didn't spend much time reading about the shooting in depth.
I do, however, read espn.com every day, reading about men's college basketball. I knew that NIU had cancelled all athletics for a little over a week. I know that the first men's basketball game that was played since the shooting took place just the other night against Western Michigan. I did not, until just a couple of days ago, know that Ricardo Patton was their head coach. I probably did read about it at some point last year, but it never would have occurred to me. You see, Ricardo Patton was the basketball coach at CU for a long time, I don't know the exact dates, but 1999 is included in those dates. So, when the ESPN lady is interviewing Coach Patton about his first game back, the VERY FIRST (actually second) QUESTION out of her mouth was comparing the NIU shooting to the Columbine shooting!!! Yes, these are all tragedies, but they are all separate events. If you keep trying to compare a present day event to one in the past, the present event loses significance. Just because Coach Patton lived in Colorado at the time of Columbine does not mean he needs to compare Columbine with NIU. Just because Virginia Tech happened in the same week as Columbine does not mean that needs to be compared.

These tragedies are their own events. Please keep them that way!