Crying hypocrisy is a fool’s game. But amid our rolling in the tragedy in Colorado like dogs in poop, I’d like you to consider the idea that the problem may not be guns, or this particular tragedy. The problem may be how we tell stories. Who deserves a story, and who goes to the dark in silence.
In a very human way, we want stories which make sense. You see it on here all the time. The pain of a lot of people is almost meaningless. The pain of one person, or a few people, or some helpless animals – that is a cause worth fighting for. It is how we are wired, to pay attention to the community we can apprehend. But maybe we need to be better at generalizing. Our inability to do so is killing us.
About eighteen thousand children died of starvation yesterday. ( http://www.usatoday.com/...) If there were a television channel showing each face, they would get five seconds each.
About 100 people committed suicide yesterday in the U.S. (http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/... ). Each in the grip of unbreakable despair.
Based on historical estimates for the last 50 years, somewhere around 1000 people died in wars yesterday (though that’s an average) ( http://abcnews.go.com/... ).
This does not include the deaths from preventable diseases, here in and less developed countries, the cost in life of poverty and oppression, the short lives in states like Nigeria where we get that light sweet crude for our cars, the dead of Mexico who have passed on so that we might uphold our common wisdom about drugs and sense of public righteousness. A long list I have just begun. Perhaps this is the machine of the world, and the remedy beyond us. But we do not even tell their stories.
What are your reasons for not considering those deaths as really “counting”? I’ll bet you have some. Those third world people need to take care of themselves, teach ‘em to fish! Those suicides – well, that’s a social problem, and besides, they made a choice. And what am I supposed to do about war?
But I promise you – for every one of those souls, it counted. It was the whole world ending.
While I do not believe in some fancy-ass afterlife, I believe that what is remembered, lives. We will spend the next month remembering the dead from that movie theatre. But we will not tell the other stories. No one will put them on a front page. No one will write about the outrage of it all, or the beauty of those lives in their short hard arcs. Maybe a study here or there.
Yes, it is terribly sad that 12 people died in a movie theatre yesterday. And yes, we could use better gun laws. But perhaps this a moment to think about how the stories we fail to tell – the way we fill our time with just one big horrible story about a few people (usually a story that feeds our fear, or engages a pity without thought) – erases the lives of the inconvenient. The ones who circumstance has damned.
Maybe we need a word for pity and fear as motivation, something suitably dismissive. The British have "twee" for cheap sentiment. What is twee with blood on it and a stranger's face in the dark? I'm not sure, but it comes on the evening news like a striking clock.
As I often say, your mileage may vary. But our media – all of it, including right here – only gets our attention, our love, our care, when the suffering is somehow undeserved, when fate jumps up and goes “boo”. And this seems to me an obscenity, perhaps the greatest way our minds are failing our hearts, here in 2012.