There's not much to add to Dr. Faber's post below about the massacre at Virginia Tech. In these situations the words mostly distort and cheapen and inflate and trivialize. That's why I remember such a visceral distaste for the media circus after the comparatively minor massacre at Simon's Rock. And that's why it seems grating to me today, like in the only "news" clip I saw on the internets today. Why is the first question to a wounded student, "how do you feel?" How do you think he feels, idiot?
I'm all for reporting the news and finding facts, but do you need any extra emotion for this story? Why are we so fascinated by other people's misery? Do we not get enough on our own, or does it make us feel better by comparison? And yet, after sucking down the last morsel of impertinent information, and learning about the perp's best friend's favorite bands, we promptly forget and do absolutely nothing until the next massacre.
We all suck.
Monday, April 16, 2007
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3 comments:
No, we kiss our kids (as I know you did) and we try and figure out how to make their world safe. Hopefully you will succeed where my generation so horribly failed.
I'd like to add two complaints about the media circus, if I may:
1. I was absolutely disgusted by the reporters swarming outside the hospitals to get every tidbit of info they could from friends & relatives visiting the wounded. Do we have no respect for anyone's privacy anymore? They actually seemed to be complaining that they "couldn't get too close" so could only get interviews from people who willingly went over to them.
2. I turned the tv off when the reporter was just about salivating over the cell phone video clip they would show "after these commercials." What does it say about our society that people want to see the blood and gore and misery and panic and fear that must have been happening inside those rooms? (I heard later that the video showed only cops outside, but with audio of gunshots. But I fear that the news outlets would have preferred to air more graphic video, while viewers watched it replay over and over.) There are some things that I hope I will be lucky enough to never experience. Why do we have such a morbid fascination with watching others really live through that?
Sadly, Angela, so little has changed in the past 12+ years. There are more "news" station, with more coverage. Each reporter wants that magic story that will cement his or her career. They are seemingly little more than automatons or robots who don't seem to get the fact that people died, that people are mourning, that they are not critics attending a tragedy where their commentary is wanted, much less needed. No one should ever experience what happened at VT or Simons Rock. Getting it right means nothing, getting fast and furious means everything. A student with a cell phone camera gets endless airtime. Wolf Blitzer asks us to count the shots. And yet all I hear is someone dying with each retort. We may someday know what happened, but what we are now learning may have little to do with truth. Truth isn't really important, getting something on air is all important. And therein lies the problem. We dehumanize in the name of expediency. We believe compassion can come at a later date. I've looked over that precipice. I've been confronted by reporters who never met my son, who had no idea who he was, what he stood for, and they only wanted to know about the troubled kids at the school. And they wanted an answer that could be woven into a story of less than 2:30 so it wouldn't bump the next commercial. And when I gave them the answer in a single gesture, they turned a deaf ear and a blind camera. Some members of my family wonder why I am a Buddhist, though not my sons. If they could look over the precipice into the abyss, if they could look into the camera with a microphone in their faces, maybe the answer would be easy.
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