Media Madness in the Midst of Tragedy

Once again, tragedy has struck, this time in Arizona.

Somebody, and I purposely REFUSE to use his name, took a gun and slaughtered 6 people. Among the victims, Federal Judge John Roll and 9 year-old Christina Green. In addition to murdering these people, the gunman critically injured U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords, and a host of others.

Our media's response has been predictable and sad. The gunman's life, youtube videos, myspace and facebook pages and musical tastes have all been analyzed, scrutinized, publicized and criticized. His grinning mugshot and yearbook photo has been plastered all over the web. Once again, we give this piece of human excrement all the attention he was craving as he made his plans to kill innocent unarmed people. Someone will probably publish his manifesto, grant him a prime time interview, make a series of docu-dramas about him and he'll be in the public consciousness in ten years while the victims and heroes of this tragedy will be relegated to "where are they now?" segments in the last five minutes of whatever program he's on.

We've seen this all before. Some narcissistic social outcast fancies himself as a gun-slinging "avenger" for all the "wrongs" everybody else has perpetrated on him and then he goes out and gets himself a highly efficient and powerful weapon, and proceeds to murder unarmed innocent people whose only crime is being in the same room as him.

At this point, our media takes over. Headlines splash about the tragedy, then are followed by report after report after report about who the gunman was, what drove him to do what he did, and how society or pop culture or the political tone or the environment or some obscure book or song or movie might be to blame. All of a sudden, our villain is a celebrity while our victims are anonymous, faceless, without personalities or feelings or hopes or dreams. In other words, they are just as they were to him. His view of them as he saw them in his gun-sight is, at that point, the view we all have of them.

But I refuse. I refuse to be programmed by a media that makes celebrities of mass murderers and psychopaths. I reject this media's attempt to force-feed me information I do not want about person whom I regard as one who has relinquished his human rights. Instead, I will celebrate the lives of people who matter.

Judge John Roll
Christina Green
Gabriel Zimmerman
Dorothy Murray
Dorwin Stoddard
Phyllis Schneck

These are the people I'll remember. These are the stories I will demand to be told. Theirs are the pictures I will demand to see. And the media be damned.