3/26/2008

I saw an article about the aftermath of a shooting

Context
I read a story on the CNN website today about a father's reaction to seeing his son's alleged killer in court. You can read the article here. It talks not only about the victim's father's hope for healing in the aftermath of tragedy, but also the great potential this young man had and the relative rarity of cross-racial gang violence in Los Angeles.

Commentary
I find myself dismayed that CNN felt like they had to tart up this story of one person killing another in order to make it interesting.

Perhaps I should clarify: I don't think any of the information included in the story was useless, irrelevant or false. As a pacifist, I find stories of reconciliation in the face of violence very uplifting. As an avid student of our social interactions with each other, I'm intrigued by the news that gang-banging tends to be a segregated activity. And I understand that news outlets are going to seek a little "human interest" in every story they report. A few personal details about the victim will keep us from treating this crime as just another statistic.

And therein lies the problem. Apparently it is possible for us to read about a human being fatally shooting another human being and find it neither compelling nor surprising. I'd like to believe that CNN is wrong about us and we would have cared without the extra details, but I don't. I don't know if we've gotten used to a certain amount of crime or if we've always been callous, but either way I think we've bartered away our capacity for outrage way too cheaply.

What did you see today?

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