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Sadly, mass killings are no longer shocking

Dan Rodricks

April 19, 2007

President Bush declared Americans shocked. Buckingham Palace said Queen Elizabeth was shocked. Former Virginia Tech quarterback Michael Vick expressed shock. According to press reports, world leaders from South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Australia and Canada said they were shocked, and Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing sent a telegram to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice expressing shock. Officials of Micron Inc., the semiconductor company that has donated generously to the engineering department at Virginia Tech, said they were shocked, too.

But I am not shocked.

And I am not alone.

President Bush's speechwriter might have thought "shocked" was an appropriate word, but I don't believe it is an honest description of how most Americans -- those of us not directly affected by the nightmare at Virginia Tech -- feel this week.

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"Saddened" was the other word the president chose, and that was a better choice. Certainly, sadness is something all of us feel at the horrible waste of so many young and promising lives in a center of higher learning. You probably feel some anger about all this, too.

But shock?

Not shock -- not for those of us who have been living in this nation and paying attention.

If you are of a certain age -- and I don't mean 50 or older, I mean 15 or older -- you have already seen and heard enough to conclude that such outbursts of violence are inevitable and here to stay.

The death toll at Virginia Tech gives this incident a grotesque distinction.

But whether it was two children shot in a crossfire on a Baltimore drug corner, or 10 shot at random around the D.C. Beltway, or 13 at a Colorado high school, or five in an Amish schoolhouse, or 32 at a university, I am no longer shocked.

I want to feel shock.

I want to feel stunned.

But instead I feel numb.

And guilty.

Guilty that I feel numb.

Guilty that my generation has not done more to stem the violence in American culture and guilty that, in fact, we have allowed our children's world to become drenched in violence -- real, cinematic, digital.

It's everywhere.

We thought there would be more gun control after JFK was assassinated, and again after RFK and MLK were assassinated, and again after Ronald Reagan was shot, and again after Columbine. We thought Martin Luther King's message of nonviolence would become a national credo, particularly after the Vietnam War. We thought there would be a progressive understanding of mental illness, so that those our society once cruelly institutionalized would be able to live among the rest of us while getting the care they needed. We thought there were would be universal coverage by now, and a generally healthier society. We thought technology would give us a "global village," with more of us connected, and fewer of us living in unhealthy isolation.

But where are we?

Where have we progressed? What kind of a society are we leaving to our children?