As a general rule I don’t voice my opinion on the latest news article. Most of the time my thought is that if you wanted my opinion on something you would ask for it.

The shooting in Wisconsin this morning was one of the first things I heard about upon plugging in to the world today. Without knowing the details of what occurred I was immediately more personally affected by this story than the one which occurred in Aurora.

The small community in Central California that I grew up in had a large Sikh population. While I was a young boy they built a temple in my town. I can remember standing on the playground looking across the street at the temple being built and listening to the insane chattering of my friends. They talked about the Temple as a compound and speculated that the vents on the higher points of the building were machine gun turrets. It was stupid talk from stupid little boys but it spoke to something more.

This population of people that generally keep to themselves, whose children were my classmates, were being judged unfairly because of the color of their skin and because of the difference in their means of worship and their physical appearance.

What bothers me about the shooting is Wisconsin and the shooting in Aurora is the lack of reporting. It seems that by this time with the Aurora shooting we had enormous amounts of details about the shooter and who he was and the media was very active in trying to assign motive to the random act.

At this point in the news cycle it seems as if the media is still trying to decided whether or not to invest any time into reporting on this at all.

This infuriates me.

The Aurora shooting seemed an almost completely random act. There was no specific target and even with limited knowledge it appears primarily unfocused in sending any type of message.

Wisconsin is different and should be much more upsetting. A person intent on murder went to a specific location where, most assuredly, there would only be a specific racial group, who believed a very specific way and where no ‘bystanders’ would be harmed. The murderer was very sadly successful. 

My unsolicited opinion is that we as human beings should feel more confusion and pain and be placed at more unease by the Wisconsin shooting than the Aurora shooting. Wisconsin, from the outside, appears to be highly motivated by hatred for a people based on race. This is what we should be working to eliminate with our every action and breath.

It may just be me. I may be seeing this wrong. Aurora seems to be mental illness gone far too long without being checked. Wisconsin seems to be hatred tolerated. If the media is any indication it would appear that we are continuing to tolerate it because its just not that big of a deal when brown people gathering to worship are killed.