It’s a beautiful Spring day here on the Texas Gulf Coast…and I’m still at home with a migraine. While I can’t think straight, that’s never stopped me from opinionizing before, and like most always, I’ve got a lot on my mind. So, as I sit at my kitchen table in my Virginia Tech t-shirt (no, I’m not an alumnus, but I was in Blacksburg about a year and half ago), I find myself pondering the scope and import of the latest tragedy to befall us. Like most Americans, I’m torn between my revulsion at the continuous, non-stop, pointless, and painful coverage on cable news and my desire to learn just what happened and why.
In my continued effort to understand what may ultimately prove impossible to understand, I find myself somewhat appalled by the degree of coverage given to Cho Seung-Hui’s posthumous manifesto and his video rantings that he mailed to NBC. The renown and attention that escaped Cho during his self-professed miserable existence has come his way in death…and in spades. The sad thing is that he had to take 32 innocent lives to achieve his notoriety. With 547 cable news channels all competing for advertising dollars and the latest breaking information, it hardly takes a Ph.D. to figure where this story is heading. Before long, some intrepid correspondent will be tromping through the mud of some remote village in South Korea as they struggle to add yet more context to this already disturbingly over-contextualized story.
I think I’m going to stage my own symbolic (and ultimately meaningless) protest by leaving the television off for awhile. Lord only knows what new and disturbing information will emerge in my absence, but I think a nap is definitely in order. I can always catch up on the pain and suffering later….
Meanwhile, somewhere in Baghdad, a group of students are wondering where the outrage and wall-to-wall coverage is over the senseless violence they live with daily. I wish I had an answer for them.
