(Article changed on April 20, 2013 at 16:41)
Is it too soon to ask this question?
Or is it about time someone did?
I don't know. You tell me.
I fear we have become addicted to this stuff; the drama, the pathos, the tragedy. the tears, the latest villain(s), the newly-minted heroes, the fear?
Drama queen III by inmortalice
We've not only become attracted to catastrophe and chaos, but we've created 24/7/365 communication empires ready, posed, even eager to deliver the goods when the worst happens.
So I ask, has catastrophe become a kind of emotional catnip for us? You know, the kind of stuff we love to hate?
Whether it's school children mowed down by a crazed gunman, a bombing, even a fertilizer plant leveling half an American town, we no longer just shake our heads in disgust and disbelief and then go on with life. No, we don't. That was so last century. That's not enough today.
When one of these kind of events happen now an entire industry swings into action. News becomes reality TV - for real -- unscripted, unpredictable, unfolding as we breathlessly watch. And watch we will, because there's no escape. CNN, MSNBC, FOX, NBC, CBS, ABC, radio, internet, it's everywhere, all the time.
If the catastrophe du jure unfolds too slowly, talking heads, whose job becomes filling 24 hours of airtime with words, morph into Dr. Phil's, delving into psychoanalysis and, when that thread runs out, they start to channel Johnny Carson's "Carnack the Magnificent."
Once the dust settles, after the action is over, the drama queens come out by the thousands. They show up by the hundreds, either at the scene of the crime or, if they can't get near that, they set up impromptu "memorials," for the victims.
I know I am supposed to view all that kind of stuff as the the better side of human nature. And, who knows, maybe it is, but I am not entirely convinced. The memorials, piled high with Teddy Bears and flowers and personal little nicknacks, left by sobbing, full-figured women often with young children in tow... it all strikes me as way too much Oprah and one last squeezing of the grapes of infectious drama. And a desire to be part of the latest drama.
Look, I know this may make me sound like just a heartless, grouchy old fart. And, who knows, I may be just that. I'd be the last to know, if so. But, ever since 9/11, and maybe even before that, we've been on a trajectory, an upward one.
Be it the media or law enforcement, the whole thing seems to me to have snowballed into something ominous and unhealthy. Local police have become less and less "cops" and more like soldiers, armed to the teeth, covered in body armor driving around our cities in armored SUVs and carrying the kinds of weapons once reserved for war zones.
So, as of a few minutes before writing this, the latest drama was coming to an end. The two guys who set off the Boston bombs had been neutralized -- which is a good thing.
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