A few days ago, I listened for the first time to a tremendously powerful Phil Ochs song, 'Crucifixion.' It's about the life, death and legacy of a widely beloved figure. (Let's put aside the song's religious connotations for the moment.) Today, as the news coverage of the horrendous massacre in a Connecticut elementary school accumulates, I think of a stanza from the song, the stanza depicting the immediate aftermath of the figure's death:
They say they can't believe it, it's a sacrilegious shame
Now who would want to hurt such a hero of the game?
But you know I predicted it; I knew he had to fall
How did it happen? I hope his suffering was small
Tell me every detail, I've got to know it all
And do you have a picture of the pain?
The public's love for this figure is matched by a disturbing hunger for the specifics of his cruel death. I am reminded of this as I see the media's unfortunately familiar response to this kind of tragedy. They voraciously seek to uncover any information they can broadcast in order to satisfy the demand for coverage. You can see their shocking tactic of demanding information from children — children! — who were just dangerously close to their classmates' slaughter. Children who could very well be traumatized. That's shameless exploitation, or at least it borders on it. Multiple Facebook friends of mine have compared these journalists to vultures.
And we've seen this hunger for the sordid details before. We saw it after the shootings in Aurora, Colorado, this past summer. We see it in this culture where the public's focus shifts so often and so quickly from the victims to the killer. When I first heard the news today, I desperately hoped, for a brief moment, that the shooter wouldn't receive coverage, that we could mourn the loss of these children and allow the victims' families to mourn. Now people are already dissecting the contents of the (misidentified) alleged perpetrator's Facebook page. We know the tendency for the humanity in situations like these to get drowned out in the feedback loop of media coverage. Focus on the killer feeds this media frenzy, and as a result we forget the tragedy and the loss and concentrate instead on the danger and the fear; we become further entrenched in our convictions of how we should deal with the fear and danger. Real and relevant concerns like gun control get lost in a mess of political buzzwords and hollow rhetoric.
Consider the words from the next stanza of 'Crucifixion,' depicting the aftermath of the death as it becomes less immediate:
Time takes her toll and the memory fades...
The drama is distorted to what they want to hear
Swimming in their sorrow, in the twisting of a tear
As they wait for the new thrill parade
We must remember the innocent whose lives were taken and mourn them as fellow human beings, not as spectators. Right now there's been an outpouring of compassion for the families of the dead. As we have the necessary conversations on how to improve our society and culture to prevent these atrocities from happening, we can't afford to lose sight of that humanity and that caring.
