2.29.17
How We've Processed
Being on a college campus, in contrast to being a primary school student or any other adult out in the “real” world, allows for a distinct, if not distorted, perspective on the violence occurring on other campuses around the country. “Distinct” because we are seeing our direct peers being targeted. “Distorted” because, although we feel a direct connection, its impact on individual campuses isn’t as affecting as the masses would like to think. Campus violence has not drastically impacted the vast majority of students lives, administrators’ choices, or the decisions of parents sending their kids to school. Like many issues, our reactions have been regulated by our own need to feel secure and, as history is cyclical, until something of great severity occurs in closer proximity to things remain the same.
Unlike high school students, who are defined much more broadly — public/private, average/advanced placement —, college students are more narrowly defined group. While our homogeneity and exclusivity continues to change and diminish, our defining factor, being in college, lends itself to feeling kinship with groups and institutions at the some point in life. Due to this, when incidents occur in or near a college community, they feel a little closer to home. Instead living the event as if it happened across the country, it feels as though it might as well be the next town over. This leads to the assumption that college students would feel unparalleled compassion, but they don’t. When threats have been made toward other campuses, a slow, suppressed wave of both fear and denial rolls through the community. The community, the students, their parents, the faculty, anyone who spends time on our campus, experiences a mild panic that is quickly alleviated by the rational, yet naïve, thought that it hasn’t happened here and probably won’t happen here and that the chances of it happening here is statistically improbable. This seems to reassure and quell any fear that had started to boil. After the San Bernardino attack that occurred seven miles and ended in a neighborhood five miles from our campus center. After this attack, the rationale used was based on the the idea that if they wanted to attack a college campus they would have. The idea is always pitched that statistically, with the number of campuses around the country, and in our area alone, the chances of an attack at our particular campus is next to none. This is the kind of reasoning that justifies our continued laxity and relative feeling of safety in the face of violence affecting other schools. There remains a nagging panic as a result of our distinct relationship and interconnectivity with other campuses, but it doesn’t have the impact it maybe should.
The distorted perspective in the face of campus violence is linked to our culture’s inherent defensive mechanisms. The idea that it will never happen to us: a piece of some discredited Freudian theory that still applies here. We feel a connection to other campuses through a very broad, outer circle of our self-schema, as though our neighbor was threatened, but not the inner circle of people and things we actually care about. We almost don’t care after the flashbulb of the event. This comes from our inability to really grasp the magnitude of the threats to and violent acts made on campuses when they’re outside our relatively small circle of understanding. The connection and emotion toward our fellow students is there, but we don’t empathize with them as much as the violence just makes us think about our own personal, inner circle. We feel a camaraderie, yet the reality and impact isn’t there. We consider ourselves safe and, while the violence elsewhere triggers a mild anxiety, since no threat has been made directly to our well-being the severity of the far-away chaos is never internalized. While the media continues to report, the unease lingers next to us like a mild shadow tagging along, but as the reports start to dwindle the thoughts do as well. Other colleges, while viewed a part of our own exclusive group to the rest of the world, no longer pervade our thoughts. We keep repressing and suppressing the fear and panic that pulses toward the surface every time our peers are affected by violence. There should be a distinct empathy for the other campuses yet, in its place, there is a passivity that many would find incongruent with our entwined macro-societies. I would like to say that I react differently, that I'm uniquely empathetic, but I find instead that we are all uniquely apathetic to our contemporaries.