Wanting to Fast-Forward Through the Next Couple of Weeks Musing

It's one thing to turn on your TV and have all the channels showing and re-showing the same old footage over and over again of people crying and hugging, of law enforcement running all over a campus with handguns and assault rifles drawn, of some kid's cell phone video with gunshots echoing around buildings. I can't stand to watch it; the thought that someone is dying with each "pop" makes me queasy. It's the same reason that it's difficult to watch footage from 9/11. I still cry. Probably always will.

But it was another thing to come to work yesterday and check the AP wire every few minutes to see if we had to replace the story we'd just laid out on the page. From the time the stories started rolling across (starting with the very short AP bulletins around 8 a.m. our time that a shooting had reportedly happend to the late-night dozens of paragraphs detailing reactions and everything else), there were 43 different wrtite-throughs. That means that yesterday alone, from the first report, there were 43 updates, changes, additions, deletions, better quotes, shortened quotes, new quotes ... and that was just on the shooting itself. Tonight, we're up to 31 new write-throughs on this. There will be dozens more over the next couple of weeks. How many ways can you phrase and rephrase a tragedy like this?

There were stories about the President's speech, different angles on the shootings, how Congress was reacting, how the sports world was reacting ... there were timelines of violence at colleges throughout history, timelines of the day's shootings, dozens and dozens and dozens of photos -- some very graphic -- drawings and graphics showing where Virginia is, where Blacksburg is, what the campus layout is, where the shootings were, etc. And on the TV that was kept on all afternoon, the same footage from that kid's cell phone was played over and over and over again.

It was information overkill on a day when the least information was available. It was dizzying, nauseating, frustrating. It reminded me of why I don't have cable, why it's good sometimes to be able to hit the "power" button and turn off the news, why "more" isn't always "better." More "information" on Monday merely led to more questions, some of them incredibly stupid and insensitive ("so what is the attitude on campus today?")

I usually like my job. I didn't yesterday. I was embarassed by some people in the media. And I was happy to turn the TV off at the end of the night, to turn off the computer, to not listen to the news, To go home and clean my apartment, to pretend that for that moment, the world was normal. I just want to fast-forward.