National Mourning

I've about had it with the coverage of the Virginia Tech shootout. It has been the lead story now since it happened with little new "news" being uncovered. The world could be (and is) crumbling, but our lead news pictures/interviews are a few 20-somethings moaning and groaning about NBC's coverage of the event they're all too happy to be a big part of.

This event, along with a number of others in the past, has lead me to believe a few things:

1.) The media coverage is extreme when they decide it's to be a national story. I'm coining a new term for this: "grief porn". The coverage gets so voyeuristic and extreme as to qualify as porn in my book. And coverage gets porn-like when there isn't anything better to distract the viewing public. Grief porn was created by the media, but is only successful because of the lizard-brain-rubber-necking response in humans.

2.) There are individuals in our society who are addicted to grief porn. Some individuals actually derive a sort of vicarious joy from experiencing these events at a distance .... an intellectualized grief ... that allows them a sense of connection to something bigger than themselves (because they're too lazy to make a life for themselves). These people are in danger of not knowing what real grief is as their emotions get exaggerated in an non-intimate way.

3.) The victims, or those in close enough proximity as to warrant media attention, are often seduced into becoming stars of the event ... their fifteen minutes if you will. For many of these, it doesn't take long to get seduced into the eventness and lose sight of any personal morality.

4.) Grief porn is very very bad for the country. By nationalizing such stories and then giving them a huge megaphone, we encourage copycats. But even worse than that. We take an event that is rare, present it as commonplace and turn it into a reason to be afraid. Now every person on a campus in the U.S. will be paranoid about shooters. Campuses will take ridiculous extremes for "security", an impossible goal on a college campus. All of this will cost a whole lot of peace-of-mind and a whole lot of dollars.

The Virginia Tech story is a poster child for the point Michael Moore was trying to make in his documentary, "Bowling For Columbine". While I'm all for strict gun control laws, guns aren't the root problem. Fear is. We have become a nation of irrational children who are afraid of our shadows. We wipe shopping carts with anti-bacterial wipes while wolfing down junk food, worry about mercury in vaccines while turning a blind eye to coal-fired electric plants, refuse to buy a vegetable if it has a blemish but eat any kind of packaged junk with a pretty picture on the label, and carry handguns for safety while driving like crazy-people. We willfully ignore the poisoning of the planet with a petroleum based economy, use resources at an unsustainable rate and elect politicians who are all too happy to pander to our stupidity while ripping off our nation.

I don't know. I must be getting old or something because the world increasingly looks foreign to me. It's all probably a natural progression as the gavel gets handed over to newer generations to deal with a world that changes at a breakneck pace. But that doesn't mean I can't bitch about it. Every. Step. Of. The. Way.