My kid's school decided it was very important to email me about a shooting in a night club in *Colorado*, thousands of miles away from me.
When I asked them to please separate their emails into separate mailing lists for things like, "Friday is a half day" and things like, "Here is a thing that happened in the news", they acted like it was their solemn duty to tell everyone about some random shooting that happens to be in the news and didn't even happen at a school.
Looking it up, about 5 people died and maybe 20 were injured, about half of those hospitalized. According to the CDC, the low end estimate of deaths/hospitalizations from flu this year so far is 2900 / 53,000, for a 50 day period. So it's killing 10x and hospitalizing 50x as many people as that shooting *every single day*, and the only mention of flu I see is not a dedicated email, it's item 5 in a monthly newsletter. And I don't even think they need to send me that.
Seriously, I'm sorry that the media tricked you into caring about unimportant stuff that you can do nothing about, but please don't take it out on my inbox.
The email says they will provide students and staff "the support they need to process this and other recent events."
I can only hope that this support takes the form of a course in statistical literacy and a warning against reading the news, but somehow I suspect it is just going to attempt to validate the narrative that it is right to think about extremely rare violence and to spend our precious life trying to reduce extremely small but salient risks. 🙁
