Letter 2 America for December 21, 2012

Dear America,

This letter is not destined to win me any friends.  Anyone who criticizes the survivors of, and the media who cover, a tragedy like the murders of little children and elementary school teachers and administrators that occurred in Newtown, Connecticut last week is treading a treacherous path,  but we have seen it so often that I feel compelled to talk about it.  Tragedy does bring out the best in us, but right next to that virtue, the media and those who have suffered loss as survivors also put on display some of the more vile aspects of human nature, sensationalism and narcissism in particular.

As to the former, the news media were on the scene immediately, and they stayed there through the weekend.  Mind you, there was nothing new to convey after the events were first reported on Friday afternoon.  By the evening news less than twelve hours after the heinous murders, we all knew that the deranged killer had murdered twenty children and seven others, including his own mother in the home he shared with her.  By mid-day on Saturday, we knew that the guns he had with him and had used belonged to his mother and included two semi-automatic pistols and an assault rifle. We knew how the parents of the children had waited nearby in suspended animation until police confirmed the identities of the dead children for them, and we could almost hear the wails of horror and inconsolable grief from wherever we were in the world...and while it could be argued that much of that reportage was an invasion of the privacy of wounded and staggered people, the coverage to that point was arguably news.  But then the circus atmosphere, what Paul Simon called an atmosphereof freaky holiday in one of his old songs, "Save the Life of My Child," descended on the mob with microphones.  The self-service and gluttony for attention of talking heads like the one on CNN who insisted on mentioning how the media suffered over their duty to cover this unspeakable crime, became so disingenuous that it was plain that the story was no longer about the people involved, but rather was about the media attempting to outdo each other with feigned piety and compassion, and grisly titillation.  He reiterated the new media credo of constraint--that the names of the perpetrators of such atrocities as these would not be mentioned so as to deprive them their macabre fame--and then he named the killer...because, he said, he had to "for the record," as if doing so were part of the chain of custody of the evidence being collected.  Even the elder statesman of CNN news, Wolf Blitzer, participated, and neither piety nor compassion had anything to do with it.  But mercenary and insincere as the press's behavior became, it did not compare to the crassness of a couple of the survivors of the slaughtered children. 

Let me start by saying that I have nothing against celebrating a life that is over rather than mourning its loss.  I have told my family that when I die, I hope they will have a celebration that appreciates my time on earth rather than maundering over the fact that I am gone.  But that presumes that my life was long, and it has been already, and that my death was natural and suffered in due course.  Such was not the case for the Newtown victims.  Their final moments were spent in terror and despair.  Their lives were cut short before they had run their courses, and not a one of them was ready to go.  I can see no basis for celebrating a life ended thus, especially that of a child, whose life was not only ended too soon, but had really just begun.  But on the evening after the murders, the father of one of the little girls who was killed appeared on television in his best suit and black tie and regaled everyone watching with his account of his little girl's virtues.  He extolled her ability to light up a room when she entered and her goodness of heart, as if such qualities were unheard of in children from five to ten years old.  His tears ran down his cheeks as he smiled, all the while obviously lapping up the attention he was getting.  He put on a show...bathing in the starlight of his dead child.  It was offensive, and I thought I had seen the worst...until this past Tuesday night.  Anderson Cooper of MSNBC interviewed the parents of another little girl, complete with pictures of her smiling in her now past life.  This time, not a tear was shed.  The parents smiled and laughed and reminisced as if they had just put her on the bus for a class trip to the capital.  They recounted their visit to a mortuary where the little victim was in a white casket and how they had loaded up their pockets with sharpies before they went so that they could draw all over it as if it were the cast on a broken leg...again smiling all the while.  Their saccharine account of the aftermath of their loss--and more importantly of their daughter's loss--was so offensive that even my wife, who has a much more forgiving nature than I, was repulsed by what seemed a genuinely sanguine demeanor in both the father and the mother of the child.  There was no sign of over compensation in their good humor, but rather there was a genuine glee in all that had happened.  It was the kind of phony brave face that people wear when they miss the point.  There was no mention of assault rifles or the failure of the gunman's mother to secure hers adequately...much less of her taking her troubled son to the firing range in order to teach him how to use it.  There was no talk of futility or wasted potential, or of the tragedy of a life that will never be lived.  They were on a picnic, it seemed, and Anderson Cooper, demonstrating once again his insatiable appetite for the lime light, extolled their bravery when the whole freaky scene was over.  But it was a fair trade, don't you think...their daughter for fifteen minutes of fame and the opportunity to display their brave faces on national television?

I feel despair over this crime as does the nation.  Having buried a wife and an unborn child many years ago, I sympathize from a perspective of some understanding, though I will never be able to appreciate the depth of the survivors' suffering.  No parent goes through the death of a child without desolation of spirit, and their absence from the television screen suggests that twenty four of the families of the twenty six child victims feel as I believe you and I would under such circumstances: private, bereaved and inconsolable.  But those survivors who chose to become celebrities on this horrific occasion demonstrated a quality that has become all too common in this country.  Their narcissism parallels that of a nation that defines its place in the world in terms of "American Exceptionalism."  We are not suffering just from the proliferation of guns for which there is no purpose other than what they were used for last Friday.  We are suffering from a kind of egocentricity that is dangerous, as the willingness of the killers in Aurora, Columbine and too many other places to count demonstrates.  It seems now that nothing is out of bounds when it comes to getting the attention of those around us, even to the point of ignoring the tragedy of the deaths of our children.

Your friend,

Mike