Watch It -- Or Maybe Don't

I’m avoiding hard media this week.

My television viewing consists of infomercials; Tim, the Tool Man, reruns; and a stinking lot of the Hallmark Channel. I’m only listening to Laugh USA, Channel 96 Sirius, and I’m only skimming Facebook status updates.

I just can’t handle the real news. It’s horrific, graphic, and just plain hurts my heart. I can’t do it. It’s not just the tragedy of it – which, in so many ways, should be enough to keep me away.

It’s way more than that. It’s what we do to these sad, tragic characters who commit these crimes.

I roll my eyes when Princess Kate’s royal bun in the oven gets so much coverage; I wonder when life with the Kardashians makes hard news; and I cringe when the First Lady’s fashion choices get airtime. The wisdom of our news industry just isn’t surprising.

Nonetheless, what’s worse than all of that nonsense is what they do to these shooters. The media we encourage and perpetuate inspects these killers; they try to explain the lives, the issues, the neuroses, the psychoses, the families, the friends, the educations, the employment records, the significant others, the living arrangements, the fashion choices, and the social ineptness of these murderers.

They explain the guns, the weapons, the clothes, the Kevlar vests, the GPS systems, the vehicles, the computers, the maps, the cell phones, and the schedules that these freaks used to commit their crimes.

They outline every second of the fatal events that these social mutants perpetuated. They interview victims, victims’ families, eye-witnesses, police officers, mayors, doctors, nurses, coroners, lawyers, judges, psychologists, and criminal profilers.

They make available to viewers diagrams of buildings and grounds of the areas where the shootings occurred; they show graphs of the victims’ ages and genders; they map the distances between the shooters’ homes and where they went on rampage; and they provide a virtual timetable of every second that lead up to the death of innocents.

Then, they furnish coverage of the funerals.

After a while, they make two-hour documentaries about these fatal, mass shootings, and they run them in the prime-time market on major networks. Then, those shows live in syndication. Forever.

Ultimately, who else gets that much attention? What other individual is made into a super hero of such a distorted sort?

When I was a kid, I wanted to be Wonder Woman – only because I watched her on television so much. Who is to say that, with a bit more of a twist in my psyche, I wouldn’t have chosen a less wholesome character to daydream about becoming?

Who is to say that some child right now isn’t scrutinizing this week’s news reports with the tiny sprout of an idea – an idea that might one day lead him to become that sad, psychotic character he sees on television?

Ultimately, evil has always been in the world. It always will be. Simply, we live in a fallen world. That news is not new. Last week did not suddenly bring different, fresh sin into our spheres. In truth, it is the same old wickedness humans have lived with since Adam plucked that first fig leaf to hide his shame.

While the sin is the same, the attention that our human iniquity gets doesn’t have to be. We don’t have to overdose on the details of this sin; we don’t have to anesthetize ourselves to the horror that these deaths brought. We don’t have to prove to our children that this behavior will get them more air time than anyone else. Anywhere. Ever.

For the unforeseen future, I’m sticking to the Hallmark Chanel and the Bob Hope shtick. I pray others will join me, and, as Max Lucado wrote in his December 15, “Up Words,” online devotional, “Dear Jesus,… This Christmas, we ask you, heal us, help us, [and] be born anew in us.”