COLUMN: Selective remembrance

From Ronald Kim's, "The Wretched of the Earth," Fall '99 From Ronald Kim's, "The Wretched of the Earth," Fall '99Imagine that you remember a newsworthy tragedy from several years ago, only you can't quite recall all the details. At this point, wouldn't you start to wonder if your mind was playing tricks on you? That's what happened to me this past Monday. I was researching the California schoolyard massacre of Southeast Asian children from several years ago in order to compare the news coverage at the time with the all-out media saturation surrounding the Columbine massacre last April. Since I didn't follow the news so closely back then, all I remembered was that a man described as a "crazed Vietnam veteran" had walked into an elementary school playground and opened fire, killing and wounding several children before turning the gun on himself. The children, it was said, reminded him of "the enemy," the Viet Cong guerrillas he had been trained to kill 25 years before. I remember watching the news at my parents' house on the night of the massacre. Thirty seconds, maybe a minute, buried halfway through the evening news. No crying faces of grieving parents. No word from the children who survived the shooting. No follow-up on the killer's past or investigation into what would drive anyone to slaughter innocent children. And the next day, nothing. Worse yet, not a word on the hardly isolated phenomenon of hate crimes against Asian-Americans by former GIs who learned to hate and kill in Vietnam. No mention of the rising tide of general anti-Asian and anti-immigrant sentiment in the late 1980s and early 1990s, both in California and nationwide. The contrast with the coverage of Columbine could not be greater. Even those who never read newspapers or watch TV news were inundated by their friends with minute details of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold's terrorist takeover of Columbine High School. As the days passed, surviving students, parents and community members filled our rooms with images of unimaginable suffering and grief. One can argue that the magnitude of the tragedy at the Littleton, Colo., high school demanded precisely this sort of constantly updated coverage, and I don't disagree. The disturbing question is not why we care so much about these victims of senseless violence. It is why we do not care equally about all such victims. Numerous commentators have pointed out the callous disregard shown by much of the U.S.'s mostly white, middle-class reading and viewing public for the desperate socioeconomic circumstances responsible for the high crime and death rates among African Americans and immigrants in poor urban neighborhoods. But at least this double standard has been acknowledged. Until that step is taken nothing can be done to correct the discrepancy in media reporting or public attitudes. And in the case of the Sacramento massacre, that has yet to happen. So far, no one has explained why the killings were forgotten almost as quickly as they were reported. I'm sure the murdered and wounded children must have parents. Were they not deemed worthy to appear on TV because they didn't speak English? The surviving children certainly do. What about them? Weren't people of all races and classes in the Sacramento area frightened enough to care and speak out? I'm left with a lot of questions, and no answers. Since (as we all know) our media give us "all the news that's fit to print," should we conclude that the Sacramento massacre was only deserving of a single day's story, and unlike the Columbine killings, not fit to be recorded for posterity? I hope not. I'm convinced that I'm not making all this up, that a horrible tragedy in a California schoolyard did claim the lives of several children, little boys and girls who would be teenagers today. And I'm still convinced that we need to start asking ourselves why we don't remember the children of Sacramento. We do our society no good, and much potential harm, by ignoring tragedies when the victims aren't people like us.