Fort Hood: Compassion Fatigue?

I’m not sure I’m buying this “compassion fatigue” argument talked about in this article by Fox News as an explanation for why Maj. Hasan shot all those people in Fort Hood Thursday. The idea is that people in his line of work, as a mental health professional, who are constantly having to empathize and deal with all the trauma of other people are, themselves, traumatized.

I’m not saying that such a thing as getting traumatized by hearing so much trauma is bull shit. Didn’t something really similar happen to the Scarecrow in Batman, or something like that? What is ridiculous to me is when the expert says it “doesn’t surprise” her” that this guy was in this line of work and did this. I’m mean camon!

Maybe what she meant was, ‘though ironic on the surface, there are clearly some circumstances of the profession which could lead one to such an extreme state.’ But that it ‘doesn’t surprise” her?

“Doesn’t surprise” is no small state of being. You know who else wasn’t surprised by something awful? Sarah Connor. That’s right, the chick from Terminator who bore the leader of the human resistance, John Connor. When judgment day finally came, she shook that fence with rage, sure, but there wasn’t even a hint of surprise in her look. She wasn’t surprised because she had done her homework. Someone had taught her what to look out for. So she narrowed down the list of factors, and finally decided that Dyson had to die. It might have worked too. Point is, she tried her goddam hardest to prevent the tragedy.

So when this smug expert says the facts don’t surprise her, why the hell hasn’t she done anything about it. I think it’s just a really insensative way of, after the fact, saying, “Well, that about wraps it up here.”