The thing which makes this murder a tragedy is that Maren Sanchez appears to have been the sort of young person destined to lead a successful life. Apart from her recognized academic achievements, the class project she had featured on her YouTube channel reveals her as an innately talented leader and collaborator. She was an athlete. She sung competently and soulfully and she could comp herself. Who knows what might have been?
The painting of the stone purple in her honor is a fitting, permanent memorial. It was a spontaneous act of devotion from those who knew Sanchez well enough to know her favorite color. I think it was beautiful, and now I am going to complain. In the wake of tragedies such as the one which befell Sanchez, a second offence - more distasteful than tragic - emerges from the loss.
It begins when the microphone gets passed around. Not to the people who actually experienced the tragedy. The people who actually experienced the tragedy are grieving in a way we would feel uncomfortable gazing at. They are discussing ugly and painful business with policemen. They're not thinking of us the way we're thinking of them. We're the ones left out here while the news vans are pulling up and the podium from the all-purpose room is being set up out on the lawn. We're the audience. The microphone is an invitation to rise up from the audience and become a participant. From there it's a steep slope from forced insincerity through expressions of vanity and on down to exploitation of the tragedy.
The microphones come out while little is known or understood - when there are a few answers floating around amid a dense fog of questions - and impels the audience to assemble and deliver a meaningful narrative of what has happened. Consequently, the tragedy that occurred is only incidental to the language used to discuss it. The names of the victims are blanks that are filled in while delivering a monologue of palliative jargon.
In the dozen or so hours since Maren Sanchez was murdered, I've heard or seen the word "senseless" invoked meaninglessly three dozen times. "A Senseless Tragedy." A tragedy is never anything other than "senseless", is it? But we can make perfect sense of this tragedy. I don't just mean that the perpetrator is in police custody. We also have a good enough idea of what happened: The killer was in love with the victim, the victim was not in love with him. The killer could not bear rejection and was driven to murder. That's the extent of it, and that's enough. There isn't some larger significance that includes the rest of us and there doesn't need to be.
Except that the microphone being thrust in our faces, or the one set up on the lawn for us to "share" into, requires us to manufacture one. We are loathe, of course, to think of ourselves as rubberneckers. We squirm uncomfortably in this straitjacket of mandatory insincerity. So we blurt out the trivia that we had been in the same stairwell where the murder happened recently. We assert, implausibly, that we now question whether our own life isn't in danger. We refer to Sanchez by her first name whether we pretend to have known her or not.
Now we are the story. The story is about this thing that happened to us. It's a pageant of standers-by exploiting a tragedy to make themselves feel significant. One woman speaking to the news cameras Friday stood out for me. Under cover of politically-safe language of concern for the children and their safety, she griped that the murder of Marin Sanchez proves that the Student Resource Officers program had been a waste of her tax dollars. You see? This woman is a victim too, you know. We all are, or at least we are all invited to act as if we are when the microphone is passed our way. The complete transformation of a coffin into a soapbox is the inevitable consequence of this culture of forced sharing.
All of it is tacky. In the post-tragedy assembly, before the news cameras, all over Facebook, in the comments sections and call-in shows, we are encouraged to spew synthetic empathy where simple condolences are all we actually have to give and all that is called for.
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