Grief tourism
On the night before the New York City Marathon, we were somewhat arbitrarily at Randolph's, the hotel bar at the Warwick on Sixth Avenue, to have drinks with a friend who was in town from New Jersey. She had wanted to meet us somewhere in midtown. We sat at the bar and started catching up with her on things, including the recent events in the news. The truck rampage on the bike path in Tribeca had happened a few days earlier, and though it had a major effect on the news cycle, we agreed, it didn't seem to have much effect on us or "New Yorkers" generally. The massive Halloween parade in Greenwich Village a few blocks away went on as planned. We saw lots and lots of families out in the streets of our neighborhood too, lots of masked people and congested sidewalks, and brownstones disguised as haunted houses, but no ambiance of fear. What could you do? In the end, the chances seem small it will happen to you, and there's nothing you can do really to protect yourself anyway, so why worry?
It was throwaway talk, but it seemed harmless enough. In a lull in the conversation, our friend turned to a stranger sitting beside her, a stolid man in a T-shirt who looked to be in his early 50s. He was wearing about a dozen different-colored silicone bracelets on his wrist, as if he hoped to raise awareness for everything. She asked him, à propos of nothing, what the deal was with all the bracelets, and he tersely responded, "Do you really want to know?" Our friend tried to make it clear that she didn't mean to seem rude; then the man began telling us about how in 2012, his child had been a third-grader at Sandy Hook Elementary, and the bracelets were related to that. His child, he was quick to say, didn't die in the attack, but that didn't mean that every relationship he had with everyone in his community and in his family, with every person he had known and would ever meet, wasn't permanently and drastically changed.
That was a heavy reply to unload, and I wondered at first whether he had overheard our conversation before and was just saying that to admonish us for our easy talk about overcoming trauma and tragedy. It seemed too uncanny to be a coincidence. But as he kept elaborating on what he had been through, it became clear that he was entirely in earnest; it was just that he was thinking about gun violence all the time, regardless of whatever people around him might be talking about. He said that outsiders found it hard to talk to people from Newtown because they worried about saying something triggering, but it's not like they ever forget. "There is nothing you can remind them of that is worse than what they're already thinking," he said. "They just need you to be normal, because nothing will be normal for them ever again."
I wasn't sure what a normal way to respond to that would be. I worried that we might be intruding on his night — he was there to watch his wife run in the marathon early the next day — but he seemed almost compelled to talk, like the Ancient Mariner, once the subject of Sandy Hook had been broached. He talked about how in the years since the attack he felt like he had to become an expert on child psychology, grief counseling, legislative procedure, gun control, media literacy, public relations, activism tactics, family counseling, mental illness, faith. He talked about how he had to create a spreadsheet to keep track of all the funerals and memorial services his family needed to attend. He talked about the injured and maimed, things the community saw that didn't filter into the media. He talked about the ways in which everyone's grief was both private and collective, and this created conflict not only between different people who were grieving in different ways, but within oneself. He talked about the families that came apart — "maybe some of that, some percentage, would have happened anyway, but now we'll never know" — and the competing rationales for who should be told what about the incident. Should the older kids tell the younger kids what they saw, what they felt, the carnage? How can parents control what's said? Should everyone be more or less afraid? "I can talk about this all night," he said.
He also mentioned the hate mail, the death threats, the phone calls, and the other abuse his and many other families continue to receive from people who believe the shooting was a hoax or who just feel otherwise compelled to mock them for their widely publicized grief. "You can usually tell right away by the envelope," he said. "Piles of it." Lots of people call to tell the families that they are liars and don't deserve all the attention they are getting — the attention that, in their warped way, the callers are added to.
The fact of grief trolling seems as incomprehensible as the fact of mass shootings. It seems like grief trolls want to keep the senselessness of the original act alive with some senseless assaults of their own. Those who see shootings as conspiratorially faked seem to take the incomprehensibility as a kind of ontological proof: If they can't imagine why someone did something, that means it couldn't possibly have happened. I felt something similar in my immediate instinct to think the man at the bar was lying about being from Newtown.
This First Monday paper about RIP trolls notes how grief trolling is often linked to grief tourism, when people unconnected to a tragedy make a public display of their sympathy. The authors of the paper note that "this behavior could be a motivating factor for individuals who RIP troll, as they potentially see a way to mock the inauthenticity displayed by grief tourists, rather than those genuinely mourning." But as with all things "authentic," how can one assess what makes grief "authentic"? What are the criteria? Does mass-mediated grief, on loop in 24-news reports, inherently seem inauthentic, contrived, out of scale?
Mass shooting truthers insist that grieving parents and so on are "crisis actors" who are pretending to be in mourning and the truthers analyze various media feeds to try to expose the victims' inauthenticity. The families in Newtown, the man told us, were made to feel like they weren't allowed to be seen laughing in public.
What can explain the irrational hatred that some feel toward the victims of shootings? Are they jealous of the "unearned" attention they are getting? Do people generally believe now that everybody sees attention as worth securing at any cost? Is that what social media teach us, to view other people (and ourselves) that way, as willing to do whatever it takes to get noticed?
Media technology has systematically made attention feel more scarce and more valuable, while making just about anything we do in life measurable in attention metrics. That includes our willingness to participate in news events by commenting on them, arguing about them, trying to contact the people involved in them, and so on. (Even as I was sitting there talking to the man from Newtown, I was thinking about writing this post about meeting him.) News events are occasions for self-expression, and that can supersede the possibility of coming to a consensus about what the basic facts of the matter are. Is it more important that our tragedies expand the pool of attention available to the entire system, drawing everyone in? Will we keep making more tragedies happen because they seem a reliable way to make more attention possible?
These were all mostly theoretical questions to me; the man at the bar didn't seem to have that luxury. It felt like he was talking to us across a great psychic divide, describing things we couldn't really ever understand unless we had been through something similar, had our own close confrontation with unfathomable evil. But with the rate of gun violence in this country, it may not be long before we are all touched directly by senseless murder.
The marathon went on the next morning, with a regime of highly touted extreme security measures in place — sand trucks, rooftop snipers, dogs, undercover agents, police patrols armed with assault rifles. Lots of people were still running as news reports began to come in about the shooting in Sutherland Springs, Texas. It wasn't too long after that when claims that the shooting was a false flag or a hoax began to circulate online. None of this was hard to believe.