Eerie and horrifying.

I cannot help but comment on yesterday's tragic shootings at VirginiaTech University. What horrors... I truly sympathize with the people of Blacksburg, VA, and my heart goes out to everyone involved.

My blog title says "eerie"... Let me explain that a bit. I came home last night, dead tired, after teaching English for 5 hours straight. In all of my classes we had talked about genocide and I was trying to impress upon them the need to teach genocide studies in high school. I was also explaining how important I think it is to go visit places like Auschwitz or Majdanek, especially since they exist right here on Polish soil! More than half of my students had never even been to any of the concentration camps. They tried to explain that they are so inundated with history that they feel overwhelmed and that they 'know' everything.

I completely could not understand that! Poles are 'fortunate' enough to have such a rich, varied, tumultuous history, with so much evidence of it still left on the landscape. I tried to explain that I think it is SO important to see and FEEL places like Auschwitz so as to prevent such an occurence from ever happening again. I think that knowledge/education is power and when people witness the horrible evils that man is capable of, they will be so horrified that they will not be able to idly sit by and allow such genocides to occur again.

Am I hopelessly optimistic?

One of my students really adamantly disagreed with me. She felt that it is important to focus on good things, on love and affection and kindness. She said that showing such violent images as photos from the Holocaust or Darfur does nothing but desensitize people more. She said she would rather show her daughters uncondititonal love and teach them good values than expose them to the horrors of genocides.

This is where it gets eerie, almost foreshadowing the events of yesterday... She started to talk about school shootings and how the wide publicity of them, with such violent and explicit images, lead to copycat cases. None of us had yet heard about the VirginiaTech shooting, even though we were six hours ahead. Then, it was so eerie to come home and read the tragic headlines on my homepage.

At first, I disagreed with my student... I mean, not entirely, it is obviously vital to show unconditional love for your children. I stated that I think that BOTH love and education about the evil humanity is capable of are necessary in order to create a more peaceful, harmonious world. But, maybe she has a point.

Are we so desensitized by tragic, horrifying, and violent images that they do not move us at all? Or, much worse, are people sickly 'inspired' by such things? There were supposed 'copycat' shootings after the Colombine massacre eight years ago. I can only pray and hope that this most recent massacre will bring no such thing. I can only hope that my thesis, that of exposing people to horror to educate them against committing such acts, holds true.

On a side note... GoogleEarth has teamed up with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to create an amazing image gallery/mapping of the genocide in Darfur. It is a wonderful use of the technology readily available to us.