The universe is again playing tricks on us mere mortals again. I heard about the 25 year old Goth with a Mohawk that shot up a school in Montreal. That is horrible, but not what I am here to talk about.
What I want to talk about is the way the media seems keen to report that this atrocity was committed by a member of the Goth community, who looked a bit weird and wore a trench coat. He had written on his website condemning all people save a select few whom he liked. He had pictures of himself on this site with guns and knives that were captioned with messages of hate. In short, he had a website that I would not touch with a ten foot pole. However, the media seems do be ripping into this website for condoning this action.
If a person commits a murder/suicide and leaves a note, does the media go after the paper manufacturers? The fact that he was writing what he wrote is not a cause of the shooting, nor should the forum in which he chose to publish his thoughts to be held responsible for an adults act. The writing and pictures were a symptom of a larger problem and I seriously doubt that the lack of a Goth blog would have prevented the tragedy. Allow me to pose an alternate scenario.
A portly 40 year old balding man walked into the school and shoots up the place. Would the media mention that he was going bald? Does your hairstyle determine weather you have violent tendencies? Is a mullet more or less violent that a Mohawk? I also notice that the man's race was not mentioned. I assume he was white as race was not mentioned. If he was of another race, that surely would have hit the news hard. "A young black\Arab\oriental man was found..." I have heard that phrase many times. Never have I heard "A young white man was found..."
Am I the only one who sees this as wrong?
What I want to talk about is the way the media seems keen to report that this atrocity was committed by a member of the Goth community, who looked a bit weird and wore a trench coat. He had written on his website condemning all people save a select few whom he liked. He had pictures of himself on this site with guns and knives that were captioned with messages of hate. In short, he had a website that I would not touch with a ten foot pole. However, the media seems do be ripping into this website for condoning this action.
If a person commits a murder/suicide and leaves a note, does the media go after the paper manufacturers? The fact that he was writing what he wrote is not a cause of the shooting, nor should the forum in which he chose to publish his thoughts to be held responsible for an adults act. The writing and pictures were a symptom of a larger problem and I seriously doubt that the lack of a Goth blog would have prevented the tragedy. Allow me to pose an alternate scenario.
A portly 40 year old balding man walked into the school and shoots up the place. Would the media mention that he was going bald? Does your hairstyle determine weather you have violent tendencies? Is a mullet more or less violent that a Mohawk? I also notice that the man's race was not mentioned. I assume he was white as race was not mentioned. If he was of another race, that surely would have hit the news hard. "A young black\Arab\oriental man was found..." I have heard that phrase many times. Never have I heard "A young white man was found..."
Am I the only one who sees this as wrong?
4 comments:
I'm with you. Thankfully, experts have quickly brought up that video games are not the cause. Or music. For once the cause is being cited as a wide array of reasons, many of them internal.
Oh, and he's Indian.
East Indian or Native? I do stand corrected.
Easyt Indian, I believe.
I think it's very difficult to avoid the default assumption of the majority. That's pretty much what the majority is by definition. If you live in Ontario, people are going to assume that your first language is English unless otherwise specified. If you're youngish and walking around on a universtity campus, people are going to assume you're a student. If you're Italian, people assume you are a caucasian with dark hiar, etc (even though there are Korean Italians, black Italians and a lot of Italians in the north with blonde hair). We still assume that most people here are white and heterosexual because the majority of people we encounter are. Possibly it's more wrong when we default to thinking of the minority? Consider the patriarchy; our default generic assumption of a human is male (Everyman). Consider "a young Canadian was shot when..." I assume most people automatically think a young male, despite the fact that females outnumber males 52:48 in this country. So I guess it is possible to supplant a default assumption towards the majority with a culturally biased assumption!
The other issue is a bit more comlex, I think. No, we wouldn't prosecute the paper manufacturing company, but if it had been published in an international newspaper which had entertained letters to the editor encouraging him to, what was it, "slay all the little preps"? or something similar, we might have had something to say. I think there are a shitlaod of issues at stake here: privacy vs. freedom of speech vs. censorship vs. inciting hate and violence, etc. All very volatile and deeply complex issues on their own, never mind with the additional questions relating to what actually constitues 'publication' these days and who is responsible for said publication. Should our blogs be censored? What if I responded to you by advocating that all the assholes working for media companies be disembowled? Probably not the responsibility of Blogspot, but if that all spiralled and "Rants from Das Goon" became a 'Hate Site' and then you went down to the CBC building and slew a bunch of reporters and sound technicians, assessing responsibility becomes a little more complex.
I have to say that, though I enjoyed your point about the balding man, I didn't actually notice that Kimveer Gill had a mowhawk. I suppose I was more concerned that it happened just down the street from where I used to live...
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