Writing

I distinctly remember the television newscast reporting the killings: a summary execution of 12 ethnic-Albanian men, women, and children, lined up in a row and shot in the back, their bodies left in a field in the Kosovo countryside. This is May 1999.

I’m sitting next to Matt. He’s in his electric wheelchair at the kitchen table, slurping a bit, as he does, while chewing his pasta. Matt has cerebral palsy, and I’ve been his weekend attendant for about seven months now. As usual, we’re watching television.

Above a network newscaster’s right shoulder, a simple graphic appears, stylized after the red, blue, and white bars of the flag of Serbia (technically, at the time, still the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia). Breezily, she reports that officials found no trace of the perpetrators, though they’re presumed to be Serbian forces as this is the height of the Kosovo War. Ethnic Albanians have been agitating for independence, but under the oppressive rule of Slobodan Milošević, his Serbian forces have committed atrocities and the conflict has flared, resulting in the displacement of 1.5 million Kosovar Albanians and the death of least 10,000 civilians. As just one blip in that protracted ethnic and geo-political clash, this report on 12 deaths lasts no longer than 15 seconds.

Matt’s right arm lumbers a forkful of pasta toward his tilted head and ovaled mouth, his pivoting elbow leaning atop his Plexiglas pictograph board, which he uses to communicate needs and ideas and jokes with a quivering index finger. The small, dark apartment is quiet except for Matt’s chewing, the television, and the ceaseless gurgling of a large fish aquarium. Matt seems to have what he needs, so I continue watching the news.

The newscaster moves on to a feature article on the Columbine High School shootings, which had occurred one month earlier. Two deranged senior students had systematically gunned down classmates and teachers, killing 13 and injuring 21, before committing suicide. Not much new to report, just more grisly details about the killers’ lives, ongoing debates about gun control in America and the purportedly ill effects of mind-gouging music and violent video games. The camera pans spontaneous memorials inundated with flowers and signs evincing support for the victims’ families and the Columbine High community. Then we see crying teenagers who’d come from across the country to pay their respects to fallen peers during a memorial service that drew thousands of mourners. Though it’s been a month since the shootings and that service, Columbine monopolizes the newscast this day.

And this is when the question that had quietly eluded me for years finally formulates itself more clearly in my mind: Why do we feel compassion for some people, but not others? In this instance, Why is breaking news about the deaths of those Kosovars, killed in cold blood, so much less important to journalists and, presumably, television viewers than the deaths of Colorado high school students and a teacher one month ago? More to the point: why, over the last four weeks, did some 200,000 people who’d previously known zilch about Columbine High School travel across the country to heap carnations, roses, and columbine, bundled with letters of support, prayer cards, teddy bears, and blue and white balloons along sidewalks, and hang hand-made banners on fences? Why did mourning teenagers not from Columbine pile into cars and drive into the night and across the country on collective pilgrimages when so many of them knew none of the victims or perpetrators or have any personal connection to the Columbine community? What moved them to care so much for these victims?

Five days after the shootings, at the official memorial service held in a mall parking lot near the school, an estimated 70,000 mourners had memorialized those 13 lost lives, through songs and tears, all on national television. Lines of students – again, so many of them without any personal knowledge of anyone in this place – had thrown their arms around one another and swayed as a speaker prayed for victims’ families, called for the rebuilding of a community. Meanwhile, the local Red Cross chapter fielded phone calls from teachers and parents across the nation asking for advice on how to speak with their shaken students about what had happened over in Colorado. The trauma reached well beyond this school and community.

So I wondered: Why did these grieving teenagers care about those dead teenagers? While Matt and I watch this most recent report about support for the Columbine community, I wonder if they – if we – feel such sorrow for the Columbine tragedy not so much out of concern for other peoples’ loss, but because the shooting showed that we are vulnerable now, that our myths about safety and childhood innocence have been weakened, if not destroyed. This grief is about us, not the victims.

And if this is the case, what can we conclude about the partiality of our own compassion, this care that we extend to certain people more than others?

I stare at the screen, at the now well-known aerial footage of fleeing Columbine students. And then I imagine footage of Albanians dying in bare fields, falling into ditches as their red, red lifeblood streams into the soil. Sure, I did feel winces of disgust and awe when I heard about Columbine. All those dead or maimed bodies in classrooms and between library stacks. Because this — one of the deadliest school shootings in US history at the time — isn’t supposed to happen. High schools in quaint and quiet middle America aren’t supposed to erupt in gunfire. That happens in war zones — such as that ethnic-conflict hotbed, a rapidly dissolving Yugoslavia. I get it: that distant Kosovo region is, in a sense, a more a logical place for such horror.

But now, weeks after that tragedy and memorial service, I’m wondering why our country doesn’t show much concern for the thousands of dead Albanian civilians who were, presumably, just as innocent as the Columbine victims. I’m wondering about the limits of our compassion and empathy. These loyalties feel dangerous to me.

I turn and ask Matt if he needs anything, but what I’m thinking is this: You’re being such a jerk, Mark. Just let the people cry if they want to cry.