Ambivalence

am·biv·a·lence – noun

1. uncertainty or fluctuation, esp. when caused by inability to make a choice or by a simultaneous desire to say or do two opposite or conflicting things.
2. Psychology. the coexistence within an individual of positive and negative feelings toward the same person, object, or action, simultaneously drawing him or her in opposite directions.

Well, I’ll just say right off the bat that this will be the first serious piece I’ve written in a while, as it is about the Virginia Tech shooting. Those of you who feel like you’ve heard more than enough about this incident over the past 2 weeks are certainly forgiven for not wanting to read this. Just wanted to get that out of the way.

Whenever something like this happens, the question everyone wants answered is “why?” That’s certainly not an easy thing to answer; pretty much by definition anyone who decides to go on a killing spree is operating with a mind that, to say the least, is not functioning like a “normal” person’s. Thus, any attempt to dissect and follow his train of thought logically is bound to be frustrating and probably fruitless. Of course, that doesn’t stop us from trying. One of the things that separates this from a lot of the other school and workplace shootings in recent years is that this time you didn’t hear a lot of “he seemed so normal; we never expected this.” Instead, you hear a lot of “there was something really strange and mean about him. He didn’t talk to anyone and wouldn’t look you in the eye.” So it seems like, although we’ll never know exactly why he did this, people that knew him seemed to be able to identify that if there was someone that was going to do something like this, he’d be a good candidate.

I started off with the definition of ambivalence because that’s the word that keeps coming back to me the more I think about it. Here was a guy who obviously had a lot of anger towards the social order of this country, particularly the clicks and structure inherent in the education system. It seemed like he wanted to make a statement about how the world had rejected him, so he wanted to do something to reject the world right back. He seemed particularly upset about “rich kids” who he seemed to think got an easy path through life and used that to either hold him down (and/or ignore him) or pursue meaningless diversions and excess. From that description, you can put him in the same category as Ted Kaczynski, who basically sought to rid the world of people he basically thought of as parasites. But there’s something really interesting about the way this guy chose to carry out this act that says a lot about him. Ted Kaczynski wanted to get his message across, but he also wanted to be anonymous. He didn’t want to get caught. This guy, on the other hand, went out of his way to make sure everybody knew who he was; sending photos and videos of himself to NBC a few days before the rampage. That’s what I find so interesting. Someone that hated “the system” so much made damn sure that he used “the system” to let everyone know who he was. It’s almost as if, after seemingly rejecting society his whole life, he ultimately felt the need to be validated by it, and this incredibly dysfunctional and destructive way was the only way he knew how. He was someone who was constantly screaming out for attention and then pushing away anyone that gave it to him. That’s ambivalence.

That’s why it was so disappointing to me that the news media seemed to play right into his hand by broadcasting the video footage and plastering images of him brandishing guns on the front page of newspapers. I have to think that is exactly what he was envisioning as he played it out in his head in the preceding days and months. The defense of the news media has been that it was news, and they have a duty to report it. I find that to be a cop-out and a far overly-simplistic view of the world. The news media censors out “news” all the time. After all, they didn’t feel the need to show close-ups of the victim’s bodies; nor do we get to see graphic depictions of soldiers cut down in the line of duty on a daily basis. I certainly am not arguing that the omission of these images is wrong; I’m just trying to point out the inequities here. It is my belief that you actually don’t need images at all to report “the news”. News should be an unbiased and indisputable record of the events that occurred (or at least as near to indisputable as you can get). Humans are visual learners and thus images are very valuable and should be used when they are appropriate. So if we agree that although it is not right to censor the reporting of a news item, it IS appropriate to censor (by omission) images associated with that news item, that turns the argument from the news media on its head. You can’t get away with simply saying, “this was part of the news story, so we reported it.” Instead, the charge to be addressed is “this was actually tangential to the story, and you chose to show it; why did you make that choice?”

I will have to admit a certain amount of personal bias here, as I currently have 2 brothers in undergrad and I myself currently attend classes 2 days per week. I make a point of all this, of course, because I am greatly concerned about copycat attempts. This country has long held a policy of not negotiating with terrorists, because we recognize that as soon as you do you open the floodgates to more, not less, terrorist activity. Well, I think we negotiated here, and our response is going to lead to more, not less, of this kind of destructive behavior. One of the pundits I watched over the last few weeks (might have been Bill Maher, but I don’t remember) made the point that when we are watching a baseball game on TV and a fan runs onto the field, they don’t show him because they know it would just encourage more fans to do it. I think it’s obvious to everyone that this is the correct course of action. Someone seeking attention in an inappropriate way should not be placated. But it seems that when the stakes get raised, we lose that perspective. It may seem an odd place for it, but this reminds me of a joke by the great comedian Eddie Izzard:

“You know, we think if somebody kills someone, that's murder, you go to prison. You kill 10 people, you go to Texas, they hit you with a brick, that's what they do. 20 people, you go to a hospital, they look through a small window at you forever. And over that, we can't deal with it, you know? Someone's killed 100,000 people, we're almost going, "Well done! You killed 100,000 people? You must get up very early in the morning. I can't even get down to the gym!”

Our current society is rife with examples of where just when one of our core principles should apply most, it seems to apply the least. You have a right to privacy . . . until the government worries you might be a security risk. You have a right to free speech . . .until you say something a lot of people don’t like. There is no draft . . . until we need one. I don’t want to belabor the point; and the preceding sentences could each be the subject of a 10 page essay themselves. I’m just saying that we seem to pretty much all agree on a lot of things on the micro level, but somehow it gets all cloudy when we get to the macro. That's also ambivalence.