"Whoever you give attention to is who you give power to"

The subject line is paraphrasing from one of the things that Craig Scott said on today's episode of Oprah. He was making the point that in response to the VA Tech incident, the media has to focus its attention on the victims and the type of people they were. The news stations keep focusing on the shooter and "warning signs," "what could've been done," etc. While that is certainly important, too much focus on Cho Seung-Hui is wrong. That's probably what he would have wanted. Focusing on the shooter also might make other psychologically unsound students want to "be like" Seung-Hui and copy his actions. There have been Columbine copycat attempts and I worry that the media attention on the shooter might bring about more copycat incidents.

The strangeness of it all is that what happened @ Virginia Tech was fucked up, but not totally unsurprising. Yesterday John asked me, "Can you believe this happened?" and I immediately answered, "Yes. " The media does nothing but focus on every facet of violence. Even with the VA Tech shooting---some of the first facts mentioned were that it was now the "biggest school massacre" in history. Even use of the word massacre seems to sensationalize the event. Tragedy is a more accurate word and focuses on the seriousness of the issue. We talk about the psychological instability of the shooter, but not until it is too late and senseless deaths have occurred.

Craig Scott went to Columbine HS and his sister, Rachel, was one of the fatal victims of the 1999 school shooting. He now travels across the country and speaks about the topic of school violence. The website www.rachelschallenge.com is devoted to the cause of preventing school violence.

I'll end this blog entry with some of Craig's words that he spoke in an October 2006 speech. I think they're wise words to consider:

"I've grown up in a culture today that doesn't teach me anything of substance, of value, how it bombards me every day with messages of emptiness and shallowness. And the youth are crying for something to stand for, something to believe in. If it weren't for ……..my family, I possibly could have fallen into the lies that our culture tells us. But now I've traveled, I've spoken to over a million teens across this country. I've not always liked what I've seen in the schools. I've seen depression, anger and loneliness, students without direction or purpose. I've seen students who called themselves cutters, have cut themselves because that's the way they know to take out the pain that they're dealing with. I've learned a lot about my generation. And I've learned a lot since I lost my friends and my sister. And the main thing I've learned is that kindness and compassion can be the biggest antidotes to anger and hatred, and I believe the biggest antidotes to violence.

With the program my father started called, Rachel's Challenge……. we've seen bullying stopped, suicides aborted..How have we done it? We've done it with a simple story of a young girl who believed in compassion……. That was the story of Rachel Joy Scott. But my sister is not the only one who believes in kindness, and she's not been the only one in her brave stance against the injustice willing to stand up for the one who gets put down in school, to sit by the student that sits all alone at lunch, and to talk to or reach out to the one who is consistently ignored or made fun of. She literally has inspired millions of people to continue the chain reaction she started. A lot of those are students across the country.

I've read Eric Harris and Dylan Kleibold's journals that were recently released, and basically Eric wrote in one of his journals, "If only you were nicer to me, maybe this wouldn't have happened."
I don't know who else is tired of band-aid answers, but I know band-aids aren't going to save kids from dying. I give every student out there a challenge my sister put down on paper a month before she died when she wrote for her class -- she said, "I have this theory that if one person can go out of their way to show compassion, it will start a chain reaction of the same. People will never know how far a little kindness can go." "