Shortly after the Dawson shootings last September, an unknown local singer (annoying Flash warning) wrote a cheesy pop song about it. Of course, being a cheesy pop song, teenage CEGEP students ate it up, and everyone grieved together supportively.

The song was turned into a fundraising campaign (with its own MySpace page – standard MySpace warnings apply), which unsuccessfully tried to raise serious money for the college.

I wrote about the artist and campaign for The Gazette (no link, since it’s not online anymore). I pointed out that on one hand, this event brought a lot of people together and the song has been getting a lot of support. On the other hand, the song’s creator never attended Dawson, and admitted part of the reason she created the song was to increase her public profile in the hope of being signed.

Well now there’s an official video for the song. Like just about every YouTube video about things like this, it’s a slideshow of (unlicensed) wire service photos of people screaming and crying set to the tune of a song.

Forgive me, because I haven’t been involved in a catastrophic event such as this one, but I fail to see how seeing photos of people crying and running for their lives is supposed to help me emotionally. It seems to me such a thing would only make it worse. The media focused enough on the violence — perhaps we should be focusing on something else?