I think very highly of Philip Weiss and rarely disagree with him. But I certainly disagree with this:
My first feeling seeing the crapulous tape on the news last night was, Burn it. What more are we going to learn about this sick monster [the Virginia Tech shooter] from his first-person maunderings? O.K., archive it, let criminologists study it, but why give him the attention he so craved? Wipe his name from history. Did you notice he honored Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris of Columbine in his statement? Why not erase their names too.
I have not yet found the interview in which Jane Jacobs says something like “It’s a funny thing. You can’t change something unless you love it.” But I did find an interview in which she said:
You can’t prescribe decently for something you hate. It will always come out wrong.
The longer you hate the Virginia Tech shooter, as Mr. Weiss and many others do, the longer it will be till you understand what to do about him — how to prevent such things in the future. It was a fundamentally decent thing that the shooter did by sending that stuff to NBC. Like everyone, he wants to be listened to. As I blogged earlier, one of my students did a project that involved visiting homeless people in People’s Park. He was surprised by how much they wanted to talk to him. The solution to homelessness, he was pretty sure, would involve a lot of listening.
Addendum: A forensic psychiatrist named Michael Weiner argues the opposite (that showing the videos does no good and lots of bad) here. Jacobs’ view is supported by a wealth of evidence. I can’t tell if any evidence supports Weiner’s view.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on these questions, Dr. R. It is something I often ponder…realizing that human beings are influenced by so many factors, for better or worse, and that we share a common nature. I feel that, although some people may be stronger willed or better educated or lovingly nutured than many others, not one of us is completely exempt from the possiblility and probablility of making poor and even dangerous choices (having free will) or from being manipulated or inadvertently harmed by industrial product, environmental factors, psychological influences etc. It can seem difficult at times to distinguish the perpetrator from the crime s/he has committed, with one’s emotional response. On the subject of media attention and publicity, I’m sure whether it is beneficial or harmful depends on the state of the watcher, which means it could be either. I for one, think the media attention goes far overboard too often in reporting, but especially in analyzing those who are accused or convicted of crimes.
On a “lighter” note (being an “SLDer”), I would think that the idea of not being able to truly change something until we love it would apply to our bodies (and therefore to excess weight) as well. It might not mean having to feel a love the excess fat, but rather purposefully and intelligently loving our amazing and complex bodies as they are created, realizing their functions and purposes which may make fat storage and reduction problematic for a myriad reasons were originally developed for health and survival. And then, with that perspective, to seek out and apply the most beneficial ways of caring for the body, perhaps viewing it as if it were a little child in order to nurture it back to health and fitness, rather continually convicting oneself of guilt.