The difference when you know someone

[amethyst73]

It turns out that I know someone who works at Virginia Tech.  One of the regular Librivox readers is a professor there.  He's been heard from and is okay, fortunately.

I was naturally horrified and sickened by the shootings yesterday at the school.  I felt like my emotions covered the whole ground from, "How could someone take it into their mind to do such a thing?" to sorrow and sympathy for the victims and their families. 

But underneath it all was an unconscious undercurrent of 'it's not me, it's not anybody I know' - which meant that my emotional involvement was at a kind of abstract level. 

It's not that I was in denial that this horrible thing had happened, or anything like that.  It's just that now all of a sudden it means something different. 

Someone I know - not well, admittedly, but someone I know - could have died.

I would bet that, in general, there are fewer degrees of separation between each of us and any event (good or bad) than we know at the time.

And even if I am personally widely separated from an event, I hope that I can still find that spark of personal connection by my common humanity with the people who are involved.

Comments

I know what you mean...

[shoutingboy.livejournal.com]

I've got a friend who's going to be shipping out to Iraq in June. I've had "friends of friends" who were there before--in fact, this friend (Renee, a light-infantry officer), has already served one tour there, but at the time she was just "friend of a friend". Now I've met her, had beer with her, talked on the phone. And now I'm going to be jumping everytime the news comes on.

It ties into one of my Big Theories to Explain Everything. Explaining the full theory requires beer, but the nutshell-version is: We're monkeys. On a basic level, we don't believe someone is actually real unless we've touched him and pulled fleas out of his hair. If something happens to people we've never met, it's hard to really get that it really happened. So it's a shock when you realize, yes, I know that person, and it happened to him.

[catagon3.livejournal.com]

My about-to-be-local friend N's brother was last seen in one of the towers on Sept 11. I had met him at N's wedding a couple years earlier. "Alan Lederman and his family" is a specific I can fill in to represent everyone involved in that.

Glad your reader/professor is ok!