I thought you might like to know…

…that I did not watch Oprah yesterday, nor will I be watching today’s show.

Instead, I will be spending my afternoon sitting in a “villa” on the 18th hole at the EDS Byron Nelson golf championship. (!!!)

This is all courtesy of a good friend who works for the local Convention & Visitor’s Bureau.  Not only am I getting to hang out V.I.P.-style with her this afternoon, but she’s also passing along two tickets for my husband and me to use this weekend.

 Yeah, I have a tough life.

I have a confession to make.

Guess what I did yesterday.  Go ahead.  Just take a guess.

sigh.

I watched Oprah again.  Apparently I’m a bigger fan than I thought.  (Maybe I need to consider adding an “Oprah” tag to my tag list.  No, no I don’t think I’m ready to do that just yet.)

Yesterday’s show caught my interest because two of the guests were from NBC – NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams and NBC News president Steve Capus.  They were there to defend the network’s decision to air the tape that they had received from the Virginia Tech gunman.  After listening to their rationalizations, my thoughts can be summed up in four words: I don’t buy it.

At this point, I should probably make sure you understand that in this post, I am making a distinction between “need to know” and “want to know” or “would like to know.”

I haven’t seen the footage, and I don’t intend to.  I’ve had plenty of opportunities – the links are all over the web – but I just don’t need to see it.  I don’t need to “get inside the killer’s head.”  I don’t need to know why he did it; his reasons probably weren’t logical anyway.  Knowing his thoughts and understanding them are two totally different things.  That’s not to say I’m not interested – I do have a B.A. in Psychology; it’s just that I recognize that it wouldn’t produce good fruit in my life.  There is no pertinent, pressing destitution of soul that can only be satisfied by watching the rants of a man in a murderous rage.

I think the American public has become presumptuous on so many levels.  I also think there are some things that the American public just doesn’t need to know.  We hear buzzwords like “accountability” and “right to know,” but I believe the only rights human beings are born with are these: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  Beyond that, as Americans, we’ve been blessed with a great number of privileges – every one of which I’m grateful for and will exercise when appropriate – and a limited number of rights bestowed upon us in the Constitution.  But I do not believe that it is the right of the American public to view a home video made by a mass murderer, especially without notifying – and obtaining consent from – the families of the victims.

When Oprah asked if NBC had considered not airing the footage, Mr. Williams said,

“To me there was never a debate. This was news. This is journalism.”

Uh, no.  The fact that NBC received a package was news.  Airing the video was not news, it was – cue news music here - ”An NBC EXCLUSIVE.”  Dictionary.com defines sensationalism as “subject matter, language, or style producing or designed to produce startling or thrilling impressions or to excite and please vulgar taste.” You can make up your own mind from there.

Mr. Williams went on to say,

“The debate was, how can we pare back, be as sensitive as possible in editing all of this garbage and profanity, to give a sense of what we have here.”

Well, obviously, “what we have here” is “garbage and profanity.”  And being “as sensitive as possible,” in my mind, is showing restraint by not airing footage of a madman when there are victims yet to be buried – no matter how big the spike in your ratings might be.

Someone – I can’t remember if it was on yesterday’s show or if I heard it somewhere else – spoke about the fact that we know the who, what, when, where, and how, but we may never know the “why.”  Today, Virginia law enforcement is still searching for a motive.  I hear things like, “The American public wants to know why,” and, “The American public has the right to know why.”  You know who has the right to know “why?” in this situation?  The families – and that’s it.  If they want to pass that information on to the rest of us someday, that’s their perogative.

Wesley Fryer left a comment on the post I wrote yesterday, and I think he hit the nail right on the head when said that “the news media seems determined” to make this situation into “a defining cultural event.”  I also agree with him when he says that he doesn’t want to see this become a “media circus.”  I feel like the media already has so much influence over public opinion and I believe, in a sense, they exploited that in this situation.

Dr. Michael Welner, one of the psychiatrists on Oprah yesterday, called NBC’s airing of the footage a “social catastrophe.”  I think he’s right.  I can’t help but feel that a certain innocence was lost when that video hit the airwaves.  Someone on the show talked about suicide bombers in the Middle East who make these kinds of videos all the time, and Arab television airs them regularly.  Is that really “news?”  Is that responsible journalism?  Have we reached that level?

It was a subtle shift, but a shift nonetheless: our boundaries – what we are willing to accept as “news” – just changed.

Some Semblance of Normalcy

It seems nearly everyone on campus is a little tired today.  We’ve had a lot on our minds lately!  A brief recap:

1.  Last week was the ever-popular administration of the TAKS test.  Monday was a regular day – at least as regular as it could be considering the black cloud of high-stakes testing gathering ominously above our heads.  Tuesday I gave the math portion of the test to my sophomore PACE class (PACE can be thought of as our school’s version of homeroom).  On Wednesday, the juniors were taking the math section and the rest of us were on a normal schedule (though bell times were altered to accomodate testing).  Thursday and Friday, everyone took the science and social studies portions, respectively.  Naturally, I didn’t sleep well on Thursday night; I was too worried about my students and the history test.  I became further concerned when a large number of them missed the sample question on the test: Who was President of the United States during the Civil War?  They picked Thomas Jefferson.  Seriously?  Seriously?!  This is upsetting for several reasons: 1) The sample question is the same every year; 2) How many times have we been over this?  Civil War = Abraham Lincoln.  How many times?  3) This is 8th grade material.

2. As if TAKS week weren’t enough, Saturday was designated as a mandatory parent conference day on our campus.  Out of my nineteen students, I had three no-shows and two who couldn’t meet on Saturday anyway.  Five out of nineteen isn’t bad; at most parent conference events (Meet the Teacher, Open House, etc.), I’m lucky to have five show up at all!  Needless to say, we were really pleased with Saturday’s turnout.  Nevertheless, it’s tough to come back to school after TAKS week anyway, but when you only have one day to recover…. 

3. Obviously there is a lot of discussion concerning the recent tragedy at Virginia Tech.  Several teachers on my floor have talked about the value of intuition.  We read articles like this one, which mentions students who had joked with friends that Seung-Hui Cho was the kind of person they were “just waiting” to hear this sort of news about.  The more I think about it, the more I realize the value in lending action to those kinds of feelings.

Sometime around Christmas, I made the decision to start paying more attention to the little voice in my head, no matter how strange it seems.  (You can call it whatever you want, but Oprah refers to those moments as “God whispers,” and, being a spiritual person myself, I’m with her!)  Now I can tell you story after story - like the time I came across my mini Maglite flashlight during my morning routine one day, and decided I should throw it into my school bag.  I kid you not, in the middle of 8th period that day, a student raised his hand and said, “Do you have a flashlight?”  Why yes, yes I do. 

Clearly, hindsight is 20/20 – or better – and I’d never dream of blaming those students who joked about the gunman for what happened.  In fact, I’m not sure I’d have done anything differently.  But now, with a week’s worth of reflection behind me, I am more convinced than ever that sometimes the line between creativity and reality is very, very fine, and I find myself resolved to be vigilant and unafraid to force the issue if necessary.

Craig Scott was on Oprah last week; he was in the library at Columbine and lost his sister in the shootings there.  Now, he travels the country speaking to young people about stopping violence in schools.  He said some things that really struck me:

“…The big concern that I have is the attention and focus that’s put on the shooter. [Reports say], ‘It’s the most bloody, the biggest, the record…’ and records can be broken. … Where you choose to focus immediately is very important. What you’re going to choose to spend your time thinking about. … We’ve focused on my sister, Rachel, who’s so compassionate and kind. And from that, that’s the opposite of that anger and hatred.”

I think he’s right in that that we should be intentional with our focus right now.  It’s easy to be negative, but what purpose does that serve?

So that’s where things currently stand.  The Big Test is over, there are only six weeks of school left, and the indomitable Hokies are back in class today.  Things are beginning to return to normal – even if our definition of “normal” has been cruelly put into perspective.

Here are four things that I wanted to include but couldn’t really find a place for:

• I came across this site today while I was gathering URLs for this post.  It’s a live webcam of the drillfield memorial at VT; what a testament to the Virginia Tech community!  I am so impressed with how they have conducted themselves over the last week.  Their private grief has been made very public, and they’ve handled the situation so graciously.  I read a blog post from a CNN reporter who’d grown up in the area and was having problems maintaining professionalism and keeping his grief in check on the job.  It bothers me that we live in a world where NOT grieving is the “professional” thing to do.
• In considering the value of intuition, I found this article about school shooting myths to be immensely helpful.
• This post on empathy.
• Despite the way it looks today, I almost never watch Oprah.  Really!

Hello. Greetings. Hi there.

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Check out this podcast!

Last week, I referenced a post by Wesley Fryer that contained his notes from a keynote session in San Antonio.  I was mesmerized by the content and didn’t even mind that it was a little bit choppy – it was one fantastic statement after another and it seemed to me that the speaker had so many great things to say that at times, Mr. Fryer just couldn’t keep up.  What a delightful predicament!  Thankfully, Mr. Fryer recorded the session and has now posted it as a podcast on his blog.  I can’t wait to hear it!