I may have this situation totally wrong, but it seems to me that a pack of drooling
baboons in the media are trying to place at least a part of the blame for the horrific shooting in Virginia at the feet of the police and school administrators. Okay that is an overstatement, but you get the idea.
I am watching a press conference where the press people are grilling the authorities with questions designed to get them to admit that they screwed up and that all the dead students would be alive, had they just done their jobs better. Again, a slight overstatement.
Perhaps the authorities did screw up somewhere along the line, but today is not the day to analyze the police handling of the shootings. Today is not the day to find parents, angry at the situation, and to exploit those feelings in pursuit of a scandal.
Things always look different in hindsight than they did in the moment. It just seems to me that there is too much recrimination, especially toward those who tried their best, but bad things still happened, as they did today. Unfortunately the news media is dominated by people looking to place blame. Bad things happened, therefore someone must have messed up and someone should pay.
Years ago I was involved in long-distance cycling, not competitively, but as a touring activity. One year I was the ride leader for several hundred cyclists on a 500+ mile trip across our state. The ride had been conducted for many years prior to my leadership, largely without incident. The ride was a well-scripted affair and the role of the leader was mostly to make decisions when decisions were called for, make announcements and to lend an ear to those with complaints. Mundane stuff for the most part because the ride took care of itself.
The ride went well until one of the riders was struck and killed by a truck, a couple of days into the tour. It was totally the truck driver's fault and the cyclist did nothing wrong. Stupid mistake and a guy is dead.
People came out of the woodwork with helpful suggestions about what I could have done to prevent the accident. Not one of their ideas brought the guy back from the dead or made me feel anything but angry. Constructive advice included such gems as suggesting that bikes on the road with large trucks is dangerous and would be best avoided.
The investigation by the police, the insurance companies and the lawyers all concluded that the accident was just a horrible accident. The truck driver made a mistake and the bike rider had no chance to avoid it.
I tried my best as ride leader but sh*t happened. I didn't need woulda or shoulda explained to me by people who had the luxury of standing on the sidelines, like the news reporters always do.
The police, the school officials, students, parents, staff and who knows else involved in the Virginia Tech shootings, will turn this event over and over in their heads a million times, struggling to find something that they could have done differently. But it is not theirs to accept the blame for the actions of a deranged and homicidal maniac. Lessons will be learned, but at the end of the day people did what they thought was right in the moment. It seems to me anyway. I guess am sensitive to the second-guessers.
When do you suppose we will give up the American obsession with firearms? Tomorrow the second amendment crowd will remind us that guns don't kill people, people kill people. Mostly in America, though.
Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky
Tag: Daily Life
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2 comments:
I see your point, and I do think the reporters were asking leading - even goading - questions about campus security soon after the shootings. It was apparent that this was an angle they were going to pursue.
However, I think one role of the press is to be the Monday morning quarterback. People hate it, and it's an unpleasant process, but dissecting tragedies like this really could help prevent them from occurring again. It may seem like the wrong time, but it will never seem like the right time, and there's a reason that our grandparents always used the expression "strike while the iron is hot." Pointing out the shortcomings now, when people are most motivated to identify and correct them, can be beneficial, if painful.
Sorry about the bike incident. That must have been horrible.
I noticed today the news referred to this as a "developing story." In fact, the event has already taken place, and the only story they are developing is the grief of the survivors and the search for blame.
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