Friday July 20, 2012
Blog Entry
A summer blockbuster premiere is exciting. There is the good weather that makes waiting outside for it to open pleasant and the anticipation builds for at least a year if the movie has credibility or a large fan base. "The Dark Knight Rises" is that kind of film. Little did anyone in Aurora, Colorado realize that a night at the theater would turn into a mass shooting.
See http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/20/us/colorado-theater-shooting/index.html for the details.
As you notice the reporting has cell phone video from the theater showing a man walking out of the theater with blood on him. The usual talk of how many injured and how many dead are early in the article. No motive is cited and the 24 year old perp did not put up a fight. He just surrendered to the police. People were evacuated from near his home because bombs or bomb making material was found. As I was reading I thought to myself that it felt like a school shooting, just the location was a theater and not a high school. As someone who was in school only 40 minutes north of Kip Kinkel's 1998 Thurston High school shooting in Springfield, Oregon I tend to pay close attention to the phenomenon. The next year my classmates and I were all shocked and chilled as the Littleton, Colorado Columbine High school shooting unfolded on the news. Terrified that it was happening again after we already became acutely aware that school may not be as safe as it was touted to be. As I finished reading the article I found it interesting that CNN ends with the note that Aurora is only 13 miles from Littleton, Colorado. Location and memory--places holding onto past events of trauma.
It is the public memory or collective memory that is striking in this article. It was something that I thought of as soon as I saw the headlines about the shooting. But school shootings are something, being in the same state as the first big one, that I pay attention to and am sensitive to. The trauma of a mass shooting, eerily with a similar body count and so close to the site of the 1999 massacre, has to resonate in an even more complex way with that local community. Surely people who survived Columbine are still in the area. Surely that feeds into the trauma of last night. Cathy Caruth (1996) notes that trauma involves a mental wound, one that is not bodily. “Trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature--the way it was precisely not known in the first instance--returns to haunt the survivor” (p. 4). The way that Columbine still haunts Colorado and Thurston still haunts Oregon is the same way that this seemingly irrational, motiveless crime will add to the haunting of those in that community. Likely it will extend and should make all Americans think about our society and what is causing this type of mass violence to occur. Violence can be persuasive and is exercised often to cause change. But what about instances such as these? What can we learn from something that lacks motive? Or do we just learn that we need to be more critically mindful of our interactions, our society norms, and be sure to extend kindness to those we encounter.
Key words: Aurora, Colorado, The Dark Knight Rises, School Shootings, Columbine, Thurston, Trauma
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