Dear friends and social media connections: Quick favor to ask here. Please consider not referring to (or spreading articles that refer to) the recent shooter or past school shooters by name, or sharing any more about the personal story than is related to the point being made. Some of those cases are very well written, bring up valid topics, and are compelling, so certainly I wont judge or argue when I see folks keep sharing them. Just wanted to pause for a second to discuss our discussion. Phrases like the recent school shooting, other past shootings, or the shooter in this case will likely suffice for most rhetorical purposes. Otherwise were also secondarily serving the agenda of keeping school shootings a fast track to becoming famous. Surely no one means to share posts about it for that particular reason, and I dont think it productive to individually blame nor fight with anyone directly over something as innocent as sharing a current interest story. However in practice plastering their names into our shared media, discussions, and memories seems like a harmful collective mistake we may be making. This person and people who do similar things are not celebrities. We do not generally reward suicide bombers by name, nor people committing most other heinous crimes that wind up deserving of either life in prison or the death penalty, with instant nationwide public attention. I am not, again, meaning that we should in any way suppress or invalidate any discussion of related politics, what might be learned from it, or considering ways we could make progress to reduce the likelihood of things like this happening more often (which is, actually, precisely what I am trying to do here via what I believe may a tiny, incremental step). I am only hoping that we can casually make a shared effort when deciding which articles to share or discuss online to stop feeding the morbid fascination with making this dead criminal a household name and worldwide personality. I think we can discuss the event and related events without naming him in headlines and leads, without putting photographs of his face everywhere. He wanted to be noticed. We are noticing him. He may be gone, but other unstable people are watching. I wish we were a culture that could focus instead on the names of the many more numerous good people that, by working together, helped put a stop to it before it went further, or who have made efforts in other areas to prevent these situations on other occasions. I can appreciate that that is a much harder story to tell. Although I think if we turn more of our attention to the comparatively few journalists, news outlets, and blogs that put in the hard work to sometimes do that, well reward it, and hopefully their competitors may eventually follow suit.
Posted on: Fri, 30 May 2014 20:36:50 +0000
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