There has been an undercurrent through the coverage of the Virginia Tech killings regarding what, exactly, is the appropriate response for those who were not directly affected by the events.
The Wall Street Journal’s Dan Henninger called it the “numbing down” of America, where the mass of people have become “hollowed out” by the seemingly endless parade of tragedies, large and small. Over the weekend, Peggy Noonan wrote of the “emptiness of phrases used by the media and by political figures, and how pro forma and lifeless and cold they are.”
Then, there is Christopher Hitchens, who takes a far harder, some would say callous, look at the emotional display after the shootings:
It was my friend Adolph Reed who first pointed out this tendency to what he called “vicarious identification.” At the time of the murder of Lisa Steinberg in New York in 1987, he was struck by the tendency of crowds to show up for funerals of people they didn’t know, often throwing teddy bears over the railings and in other ways showing that (as well as needing to get a life) they in some bizarre way seemed to need to get a death. The hysteria that followed a traffic accident in Paris involving a disco princess—surely the most hyped non-event of all time—seemed to suggest an even wider surrender to the overwhelming need to emote: The less at stake, the greater the grieving.
And surrender may be the keyword here. What, for instance, is this dismal rush to lower the national colors all the damned time? At times of real crisis and genuine emergency, such as the assault on our society that was mounted almost six years ago, some emotion could be pardoned. But even then, the signs of sickliness and foolishness were incipient (as in Billy Graham’s disgusting sermon at the National Cathedral where he spoke of the victims being “called into eternity”). If we did this every time, the flag would spend its entire time drooping. One should express a decent sympathy for the families and friends of the murdered, a decent sympathy that ought to be accompanied by a decent reticence. Because Virginia Tech—alas for poor humanity—was a calamity with no implications beyond itself. In the meantime, and in expectation of rather stiffer challenges to our composure, we might practice nailing the colors to the mast rather than engaging in a permanent dress rehearsal for masochism and the lachrymose.
Provacative, yes (it is his stock in trade). But is there a grain of truth here?
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