Please retract your branding efforts regarding this terrible event. Please don't treat the murder of five-year-old children as the launch of your movie franchise. Remove the tailor-made graphics. Turn off the somber music as you show the images of fright, grief, and despair. There is no appropriate soundtrack. Anything else is selling us something, and you cheapen the deaths of children by doing so. Silence is required, O network news media. Anything else is very sick. We are sick that we have, for so long, allowed you to tell us about tragedy in such a callow manner. Over time, we have permitted our natural grief to be exploitable, our fear to be kindled, our desire for reflection and restitution to be channeled into pre-programmed avenues of faux sobriety and helpless wonder.
Please, decency. Please, please, please. We should not be willing to have our grief always tampered with, and the television news media should not forever be eager to exploit it. Thank you for information, thank you for reporting, thank you for journalism. These are the basic needs people have in relation to the service you provide, and when you do provide them, the service you render is invaluable. And when you commodify tragedy, you desecrate our collective conscience, you damage our collective heart, and you prevent any real learning.
I am praying for the families tonight - though some psychological mechanism has kicked in and I am unable to even contemplate their grief for more than a few seconds - I don't even know what I would wish for them, in the darkest hour, so I am just praying for them. Somehow, some way, some help come to them. For my country, I would wish for a real conversation about our culture. Our care for each other, or lack thereof. The roots of violence. Why we are killing our planet. I would wish for an end to gun violence, period. Just an end. Fruitless star-wishing on the Gemenid meteor shower tonight - the biggest wish, to have these children and their teachers, their helpers, back alive; and everywhere, in Syria, Somalia, children, mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers, dreams, dignity, innocence, love, and life preserved - but, one small boon, though vastly improbable, would be a balm on this nation's soul: please stop selling us these children's deaths.
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