Tragic Ownership

One more brief post on Virginia Tech. My friend and fellow blogger rightly (I think) indicated that one of the developing goals of media is to "involve the participants in the events and the reporting"...to include us in what is happening. I think this explains my (and, from what I understand, most of the nation's) television vigil after September 11. This was a shared experience...although I do think, as I indicated yesterday, that it reached kind of a morbid fascination level for me. I don't want to call it an "excitement"...but there was something about watching "history unfold" (something I was reminded of repeatedly by the broadcasters) that kept me glued. I have a problem with this.

Maybe if they stopped running commercials, I'd have an easier time. Maybe if they stopped repeating over and over and over how monumentally terrible all of this is as if we didn't know already. It seems like re-hashing to me (insert comment about the irony of me re-hashing the situation here). Repeating, over and over and over again, the terrible stories and the tragic images.

The worst example of this: local news. In their desperate attempt to connect the story to "the Metro area," they have combed the phone books looking for relatives and friends to get their tales of woe and hurt. They have presented stories about how easy it would be for somebody to go on a rampage at CU and CSU. And they have (most unnerving of all) gone to visit the victims and eyewitnesses of the Columbine shooting to get their feelings and to "see if it has brought up any bad memories." Then they go back to the news desk, the head anchor shakes his/her head and says something to the effect of: "We will never forget that terrible day." You're right...because you won't let us.

So I guess I've put a finger on why I feel dirty watching the news right now. The news currently presents two things: blame and re-hash. And that's because it is exactly what we want. We want to see the footage, we want to "be there," we want to get that visceral rush of experiencing something monumental. We want to be impacted. But (and here's the rub), we really don't want it to compel us to change. We want to stay in front of the TV...and, if it gives us somebody or something to blame, all the better. We don't want to consider how we can work to prevent something like this from happening in our community...we don't want to reach out to others. We want to see something historic and how it impacts us.

And, unfortunately, I think that's the chief end of the media and our chief end when we watch it...to impact and be impacted. Unless it is done away from the TV, there isn't any real healing, there isn't any grieving, there isn't any semblance of moving on and learning from tragedy. It's all about the "experience." About something unforgettable that we all "own" a part of...even if that something is a deep and terrible wound that we refuse to let heal.