David Kanter | A tale of two tragedies

Two Thursdays ago, tragedy struck the campus of Northern Illinois University. A disgruntled former student burst into a lecture hall and opened fire, killing five students before taking his own life.

Within hours, camera crews swarmed the scene, and the media quickly spread the devastating news. As college students, we were all poignantly reminded of our own mortality as we remembered the victims of this unthinkable act of violence.

Yet, less than a week later, within an eight-hour span, there were five murders in Philadelphia only blocks from Penn's campus. Aside from the standard news reports in the local papers and a few mentions by the local cable affiliates, these homicides went largely unnoticed.

Why then does the murder of five students halfway across the country elicit our most heartfelt sympathy, while the murder of five locals in our own backyard barely elicits mention? Doesn't the premature loss of any human life deserve our most vehement moral outrage? For answers, I turned to postdoctoral fellow Mark Doyle, who teaches "Massacres in History."

"Campus violence, because it is seemingly random, allows us to imagine that we or our children might easily have been victims of the violence, and we therefore tend to identify with the actual victims and their families," he said in an e-mail.

Violence in our inner cities, on the other hand, isn't unexpected. In Philadelphia last year there were 391 murders.

The shooting at NIU and the massacre last April at Virginia Tech jar our conception of the academic idyll - we don't associate violence with our college campuses. It's reasonable for us then to become a little uneasy and to sympathize when we see others similarly situated - college students not much different from ourselves - become the victims of random violence. But still, does that excuse our blatant lack of sympathy for the victims of violence in Philadelphia? Aren't many of them 18- to 22-year-olds like us?

Yet there is one defining characteristic that differentiates the NIU tragedy and the frequent killings in Philly: Violence in this city is usually black-on-black.

It's too easy for me to say that the only reason many of us don't ardently demand inner city reform, is because most people are closet racists - they aren't. But it's also too easy to say that race doesn't matter. Doyle pointed out that while the average American certainly doesn't "actively support black-on-black violence, the fact that inner-city violence is also usually black-on-black violence makes it easier for white Americans to tolerate it."

The legacy of race in this country is too pervasive not to be a factor in our disparate reactions to campus and inner-city violence. Surely, campus violence demands outrage because it is rare and unexpected, while our response to city violence is muted because it has come to be the norm. But why did we ever let inner-city violence become the norm? Certainly race had a role to play in that. And if it did, how can we let our consciences rest if we allow inner city dysfunction to persist?

So as the firestorm surrounding the NIU shooting dissipates, we are left with a lot of room for improvement. Department of Public Safety has already responded adequately. It's putting its new emergency alert system to the test this coming Friday. Our University, quite rightly, is taking every precaution to secure the safety of students, faculty and staff in the event of an emergency situation.

But we can learn a lesson of greater and more immediate import from the shooting at NIU and the massacre at Virginia Tech. The seemingly random and indiscriminate nature of this violence makes the specter of violence so much more real for Penn students - it could happen here. So, as Doyle points out, "The best thing may be to take the sadness and outrage that such events generate and to channel these feelings in a slightly different direction - to think about all victims of violence, regardless of ethnicity or geography and to try to combat such violence."

And we shouldn't let anything color this high-minded goal.

David Kanter is a College freshman from East Falmouth, Mass. His e-mail is kanter@dailypennsylvanian.com. David Versus Goliath appears on Wednesdays.

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