WARNING: The following is a rant.
I remember that day.
I was shocked, I was saddened, I was angered. I remember the fleeting thought, visceral as it was, that the Middle East would be turned into a sheet of glass.
I followed somewhat the rescue and recovery effort.
But then, a few days into the thing, something happened.
I don't remember if it was the political opportunism of George Bush, with his pre-written (at least I believe it was) megaphone soundbyte.
Or was it the cheesiness of Sammy Sosa holding a flag as he circled the bases after that first home run.
Or the gleeful rush to war in Afghanistan.
Or if it was the endless punditry saying "America feels this feeling" or "America thinks these thoughts", but after a while I wasn't thinking OR feeling what the TV machine was saying I was supposed to be feeling and thinking.
I wanted everyone to just Get. On. With. It.
Even back then, people were saying how "everything had changed".
Really?
People still woke up and went to work. People did their jobs, took care of their children, and went on living. What had happened didn't affect me at all. I didn't know anyone who got killed, I wasn't part of that exclusive brother-and-sisterhood of firefighters and police, and I was very definitely not military.
Even working in Chicago, I wasn't concerned. After all, I worked in the part of town no one cared about--the South Side. I remember being asked about this attitude, and replying "Why? Why should I get so emotionally involved with something I had no control over and could do nothing about?"
And I was angriest about the anthrax attacks, because I knew that was domestic and yet no one really cared about that. Because Democrats were being attacked.
I supported the war in Afghanistan, because that's where they were. But then they started talking about Iraq. And the people on the TV machine went along. And propagated it, abrogating their journalistic responsibility for "the story".
Reading today's KosAbility diary, it occurs to me that more people were traumatized by the media than by the shock of the events.
I read the histories of our times. I talk to people who were there. When John Kennedy was killed, the nation was glued to their televisions--perhaps the very first time that the media went into "24 hour news cover mode". From that Thursday when Kennedy was shot through the Sunday when Ruby shot Oswald, and through the funeral the following Monday, there was nothing else on TV.
Now imagine what that weekend would have been like with today's media.
I was just reading an article about the 10th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. There was no wall to wall radio coverage, there weren't special sections or extra editions of the newspapers. In fact, according to the article,
"A reporter for The Springfield Union in Springfield, Mass., found that only three of 23 people interviewed on the city’s main street remembered why the day was significant. Even in Hawaii, some were unaware. A reporter for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin found that six of 15 people polled on Dec. 7 didn’t know it was the anniversary."
There was a small Navy ceremony over the ruins of the Arizona, and a couple of church services, but that was about it.
See where I am going?
See how we have been poisoned?
Whenever anything happens, be it the attacks, be it Katrina, be it the deaths of Diana or Michael Jackson, we get wall to wall saturation. We get special graphics with somber music.
We get people TELLING us how we should be feeling. We get people TELLING us that feeling differently, or having a different perspective somehow makes us "not American".
Because they WANT you to feel a certain way. That's how propaganda works.
They manipulate your emotions, then they push their agenda.
Yeah, I've soured a bit when it comes to these things. I refuse to have these people on the TV machine telling me what and how I'm supposed to feel and think about things like this.
There are those for whom today is a deeply intense and personal trauma. Please let's not poison their very real grief with mindless media hype and promotion.