Another Killing

By the time I found out last night, the sun had already set on yet another day in which an American school was the site of a shooting homicide. It’s possible that I wouldn’t have seen the story at all if I hadn’t idly visited CNN’s website after getting home and perusing Twitter, Facebook, and email. Upon seeing the story, I was shocked that none of my social media feeds had mentioned it.

What they had delivered was a stream of information relevant to my interests: coverage of the night’s Giants game, predictions for the jobs report, personal status updates to keep me abreast of people I never see. None of the feeders into my personal mediasphere seemed concerned, or even aware, that a boy in Nevada brought a gun to school, clearly with no plan of action, and shot a few people before killing himself.

My head didn’t reel. The story filed compactly into a well-used slot of my public consciousness, one just outside the sphere where analysis is possible but wholly under the umbrella of familiarity. So familiar was it to process a school shooting, in fact, that my main interest turned toward the conspicuous absence of the exercise’s one reliable feature: public grief. There was none to be found. None of the disparate sources I had assembled to provide a constant supply of highly personalized information seemed to consider this shooting within their core competency. Like the disaffected boy himself, the story fell through the cracks.

The reasons why no one bothered to make much out of the incident were easily apparent: the body count wasn’t high, the shooting was committed in a location far from cameras, and the weapon was one that will never appear on a ban proposal. Even the ostensible cause—bullying—is already an issue that pop culture is working to address. It seemed that as long as everyone shook their heads and threw up their hands a little, we could agree to save our outrage for the next numbing incident.

Earlier yesterday (much closer to when the shooting took place) I read an article about a plummeting sex drive among Japanese youth. Apparently millennials there are being swept up in a national “flight from human intimacy” that demographics experts are calling an epidemic. Like so many of these stories we hear from across the Pacific, it seemed bizarre and safely foreign.

Alone in my bedroom, I refreshed my Twitter feed again and a few new tweets trickled in on all manner of things that didn’t really matter to me. Still none of them weighed in on the deaths that were committed that day in a desperate plea for empathy.

The “epidemic” flight from intimacy didn’t seem very bizarre. In fact, the vacuum felt palpable.