[CHAPEL HILL, NC, USA]
The shooting of a professor by a graduate student in a lab building, in the middle of the day on the crowded UNC university campus was certainly shocking. Sensational enough, in fact, to get international media coverage, including on this site.
The day of the shooting a friend of mine in Italy texted me the CNN story, with the message “You live in a very dangerous environment…”. He’s right, of course. The UNC shooting is, in fact, just the tip of the iceberg of the daily flow of violence here in my part of North Carolina. The overwhelming majority of these stories never make it past the local news, but they add up with alarming regularity. In fact, these “normal” violent stories are a daily part of the local headlines, but they remain mostly out of sight to national and international readers.
There’s something insidious about seeing so many violent headlines mixed in with politics, opinion, national news and the weather like I do every day. One gets inured to them. Speaking for myself, these headlines have begun to register like a kind of back-of-the-mind ticker of the rising tide of bloodshed around me, but I don’t think about them too much.
Perhaps I should.
There’s something profoundly wrong, it seems to me, with acquiescing to the tide of violence as “normal” – just another day here in NC, in the USA. The fact that so many children end up involved is all the more reason to pay attention. I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating – it did not used to be like this here.
But acquiescing to the violence as normal is exactly what we’ve done as a society. Consider the headlines below from the past two days just in my region of the state, a chronicle of near daily violence: has there been an outcry? Interviews on CNN? Marches, protests, speeches from politicians?
No. These are just another few days’ worth of headlines here, nothing unusual anymore, and not anywhere as sensational as a well-known professor shot dead on a major US campus. No, these are the “normal” violences that are now part of everyday life here.
Two children, one woman shot in Goldsboro on Saturday night
Shooting in Fayetteville leaves one dead, one injured, juvenile charged
Man shot, killed Saturday morning in Durham
Man shot in Rocky Mount dies after police find him on sidewalk
Raleigh police step up patrols in Glenwood area after restaurant manager murdered
NC trooper fatally shoots man in an exchange of gunfire after a pursuit and crash
She said she shot killed her lover in self-defense. Court says jury properly saw her as the aggressor
North Carolina’s Supreme Court upholds a death sentence for the convicted torturer and murderer of a 4-year-old*
I think that Americans are taught that ours is a country of fairness, justice, law and order and equality. At least we are as we’re growing up. But now a new message is replacing the idea of “Brotherly Love” that gave Philadelphia its name and inspired many of the founders of this country, and that is that we are all in danger from those living around us. This insistent message has successfully initiated a vicious cycle in US society: the less safe we feel, the more we buy weapons, and the looser the restrictions on weapon ownership become a flood of weapons becomes available, and the violence rates keep rising. As a result, this message of danger all around us from our fellow citizens turns out to be undeniably and self-fulfillingly true. We now live in an increasingly violent, heavily armed society, where acts of sexual and lethal (and many other forms of) violence against people of all ages are a daily occurrence in every part of the land. This is a fact.
And it is not normal.
*Source for all headlines: WRAL.com
Top Photo by Andy Montes de Oca on Unsplash
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