Yesterday morning, I turned on CNN, as I have been doing several times a day since Monday morning, to catch the latest press conference from Virginia Tech. As a freshman at a fairly large University in the Northeast, Monday's events have left me more then a little bit shaken, and as the relentless march of the academic calendar heads into final project and exam season, there has been a visible tension on everyone's faces for the last four long days.
Awaiting the start of the press briefing, word came through that at least 60 people were dead in massive bombings in Baghdad. The final death count would prove to be at least 171 according to the Times. The news merited about 20 seconds on CNN, before the network cut to commercial and then back to inane patter and speculation about the VT shootings. Today, Monday's shootings merit 8 above-the-fold stories on CNN.com, while Wednesday's bombings go completely unmentioned anywhere on the homepage. From the Times, the bombings get a small link under the World section below the fold this afternoon.
We have no profiles of the Baghdad bombing victims. We have few harrowing live interviews with survivors. There are no press briefings, and there will be no "after-incident report" on the five bombs that exploded in Baghdad Wednesday. No one will ask why the warning signs weren't properly heeded, whether the police and the military did all that they could.
We maintain this fiction that our world is becoming more and more flat, and yet... Why is a Virginia Tech student's life worth more to me than an Iraqi's? Why is a Virginia Tech student's life worth more to me than a Darfurian's? I don't know, but it is. We keep up this fiction that we live in a flat world, and yet 33 horrific deaths in Blacksburg reverberate, and rightly so, for days while 171 deaths in Iraq, hundreds of thousands of deaths in the Sudan, and countless other deaths from preventable diseases and all the other heartbreaking causes in the world receive just moments of our attention in this round, round world. This world of ours, it's not flat at all.