It Takes All Of Us

I’m old enough to remember when “Why?” was a talking point.

It was the question that followed some truly horrible shit like a mass shooting or a body cam footage release. A news anchor would begin with that unanswerable question when introducing a guest or as a way to segue to a live remote. A celebrity talking head would use up an hour on the question in the name of ratings. The medium dictated the narrative because it was some dramatic shit to be laying down.

And you know what? We’ve done it all wrong.

We got fed this public service announcement ad infinitum and we ate up the empty calories. It was bupkis on a stick. The broadcasting of all that really bad shit did nothing to stem the tide. All it did was fetch corner offices for the on-air talent.

Let’s go back to 1999 and the Columbine shooting. We got wall to wall coverage on a sum of all fears scenario; disenfranchised kids laying siege on a student body. Kids killing kids. Anchors and talking heads asked Why and journalists wrote about how our culture was in need of change and okay . . . how we doing with that?

A little less than a quarter century later, we still have kids killing kids. Maybe they flunked standardized testing or got dumped right before prom or ditched the meds and failed in that sobriety. Whatever the reason, it’s solved with violence now. That’s because too many kids have come to see themselves as fringe participants in a world gone sideways. And they’re plenty angry about it. Having been raised on TV and its many cousins, they have come to understand that there is no such thing as bad publicity. So then, it’s not a matter of asking why they carry out these horrific acts when we should be looking at what compels them to choose such a thing in the first place.

Us.

Let’s face it, we ain’t the most sterling examples of self-restraint. In fact, us grown ups have made a real mess of things. We drank from the well of the same medium we raised our kids on, ignoring the fact it was getting us nowhere at the speed of light. And no, scapegoating the media ain’t getting us anywhere; they didn’t set the fires, they simply reported on them. But all those horrible days that had us glued to our sets amounted to precious little educational value. Unless anger counts for something, because we have plenty of that and it’s more infectious than whatever the latest virus happens to be.

In the age of safe spaces, we ain’t got one. We live in a world where brawls at little league games and gunfights at kid’s birthday parties don’t even make us flinch. We have become the narrators, acquiescing to the storm that threatens to sweep us under while cashing in on the viral acrimony with our devices and our social media platforms.

And when our cache runs dry, then we’ll blame the media . . we’ll blame the other party . . we’ll blame teachers and bankers and lawyers and Jews and Blacks and Asians and Muslims and anything and anyone else. And the only change that will come of doing so is that bad will get worse.

Last month it was LA and Memphis; but they are just the latest ground zero moments. They sure as hell won’t be the last. Because there is always going to be another routine traffic stop that turns tragic. There is always going to be another kid or grown up looking to settle their differences with a gun. Violence is how we solve our problems; from Memphis to LA to every other place in the world that’s just waiting to get in trouble, somehow and someway and sometime soon. And maybe we’ll get it through our thick heads that the time to ask why is long gone.

We have to start asking what the hell we’re going to do about it.

 

 

 

 

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