Hitting Home Away From Home.

[captainsblog]

We're easily desensitized by the quantity and speed of news coverage in these times. It is so different from those Four Days that so changed the course of our nation's history in 1963. I was a just-turned four year old, and most upset, apparently, because the assassination coverage pre-empted Captain Kangaroo. Those non-stop hours of news coverage were, then and for years later, unprecedented. Now, with every one of these events, we're inundated with images and information- and much of it, given the need for speed in the news business, is not only tragic but horribly wrong.

Go ask a guy named Ryan Lanza about that.  It was his 20-year-old brother Adam, apparently armed with his older bro's ID in addition to everything else, who did the deed in Connecticut yesterday, but that didn't stop the 24/7 news cycle from branding him as a mass murderer before lunchtime yesterday.

I still can't process the grief, the horror, the answers to the tough political and societal questions that we must answer differently than we've been answering them in recent years. I do, however, find myself able to wonder if I am more horrified by these incidents when I have some connection to them than the, say, Columbine incident which was completely unconnected to me and mine.

Sad to say, I've had some experience with this before this week.

----

The September after those Four Days in November of 1963, I started kindergarten in a nondescript Long Island suburban school. I spent the next seven years in the same building, and often the same classroom, with a future serial killer.

Joel Rifkin was a loner, even then. His family tried to get him involved in activities, whether to bolster his future chances or his self-esteem, but it never went well for him. After the revelations of his into-the-1990s killing spree, many sources reported how his fellow members of the track team tormented him, on and off the school grounds. We geeky kids were not immune from doing it, either; Joel was the photography editor for the school paper, and in our final issue before graduation, the editors included him in the "Last Will and Testament" of snarky remarks to teachers and fellow students.  The faculty advisor supposedly kept the really bad stuff out (he wouldn't let us leave a "grammar school equivalency diploma" to one of our unfavorite gym teachers), but he had no problem with us leaving Joel "a shade for the lamp in his darkroom."

I never saw or spoke with him again after we crossed that final stage in '77, but when he was arrested in 1993, state police were on the phone to me, and dozens of other farflung members of that class, in an effort to understand and respond to any defense he might raise.  I can't find any online, but there were pictures floating around the primordial Internet back then of him, me and the other newspaper editors from that year's edition of the yearbook.

Was I more shocked because of the connection? Only because I would have put him dead last- 676th out of 676- if our yearbook had held voting on a "most likely to grow up and kill nine prostitutes" category.  Yet when Columbine followed, six years later, I felt no less pain. The school setting made it scarier, the quantity alarming, and the amount of and indifference to those kids' weaponry? As inexcusable then as the continuation of that indifference is today.

----

Which gets us to yesterday, and for me, today. I'm home, where I wasn't supposed to be today. I'd had plans to be at a friend's book launch at a Manhattan bar beginning at noon today- a much-needed detour of both miles and spirit from the funeral I need to attend on Monday.  By last night, though, it was clear I could not do that, although I will still be attending the service in Pennsylvania day after tomorrow.

One of my nieces lives about 45 minutes from Sandy Hook. (Of course it had to be my late sister's name, too, just to upset the girl even more.)  Even closer to home for her, though, is that her husband is a major crimes investigator for the Connecticut State Police. He was, and remains, on the scene, coming home only briefly for showering and napping, and Mark has seen and felt far more of the carnage inside that school than even the 24/7 news cycle can bring to the rest of us.  Seeing this Marine, this marathoner, in tears as he said goodbye to their own three-year-old son today was an experience that Nicole will carry for the rest of her life- and, to a much lesser extent, I will for mine.

I offered to head out there, today or tomorrow, if it would help Nicole care for Kyle- who, even before all of this, was going through a seriously clingy phase. She's decided to spend the absolute minimum amount of time away from home to deal with the memories of her grandmother- leaving their home at 4 a.m. on Monday and back, quite possibly, by dinnertime that night.  I will head straight there tomorrow afternoon, via my other sister's, so we can be there for our niece- who needs far more now than any prayer or flower arrangement can even begin to provide.

Next week will bring something else, somewhere else.  Odds are, it will be Nobody I Know in Noplace I've Been, USA. But until we fundamentally change the conversation about why these things happen and really deal with both symptoms and causes, it's the What, not the Who or the Where, that contains the greatest amount of the tragedy.

Comments

[stress-kitten.livejournal.com]

Love and thoughts to you guys as you help support the people who are dealing with that horrendous aftermath. I hope they have really good counseling in place for the first-responders - they're going to need it. *shudders*

I've been avoiding viewing any media about it, to be honest. The rapaciousness of the press, and the obsessive viewing of it and the stupidity of so many of the comments from people, just make me want to throw up. It's a tragedy enough on so many levels; the media circus takes that tragedy and just... ugh.