One of the issues that frustrates me the most has cropped up in the news this past week. That manifested itself in the form of one Natalee Holloway, the Alabama high school senior who went missing in Aruba. Now I have nothing against Holloway herself; by all accounts she is bright, charming and is missed very much by her family. But why is this national news? There have been seven stories in the past week devoted to the story of this one girl on CNN.com, a national website. I suggest there are a few reasons why stories like Laci Peterson, Chandra Levy, the runaway bride in Georgia or whatever and Dru Sjodin (for those of you in MN) get major press, while other stories are pushed off the front page.
1) The pretty, white, young, rich, female victim. 'Nuff said.
2) Pushy parents who are always on TV attempting to garner sympathy for their plight. They basically create the news to make sure the story has legs.
3) People are afraid to talk about what's wrong with America, so they cover victims who didn't do anything wrong. The kidnapping or murder of young, rich white women in society is not a problem, but the murder rate in our society is obscenely high. So instead of investigating the cause of all the murders in the United States, they focus on the cases where the usual causes don't apply. There are almost 700 murders in New York City alone each year. Is this a problem? I would say yes. So why don't we investigate the problems that cause all these murders. Would we be able to cut down on all these murders with tighter gun control policy? Stricter drug laws? Maybe if we reduced poverty, people wouldn't do drugs as much.... The point is, that most kidnappings and murders have a cause, and we should be investigating the causes of the murder epidemic, not finding the most innocent victims we can and publicizing the shit out of it.
I think this is the fundamental problem with "Bowling for Columbines." Michael Moore claims that he wants to find the cause of the high murder rate in the United States. But by focusing on a school shooting, he's absolutely looking in the wrong place. Are school shootings disturbing? You bet. Should we do what we can do stop them? Absolutely. But if we want to find why our murder rate is so high, we should be looking in South Bronx, East Brooklyn, Oakland, Watts and South Side Chicago. These places are where most of the murders happen. Why? I'm not sure. There's probably a lot of drugs involved. How do we stop it? I'm not sure, but we sure ought to think about it.
But there has to be a reason that nobody is interested in covering what we could do to reduce the murder rate in the United States. It seems to me that covering reasons for all the murders in America's slums would make suburbanites feel uncomfortable. They wouldn't want to read the newspaper or watch TV if they felt there were actual fundamental problems causing murder and death in America's streets. It's much more comfortable to cover a phenomena that has no fundamental cause, because nobody's really at fault, except for the wackos who did it. And nobody sympathizes with them anyhow. If we took a careful look at the murder rate, I think we would find that poor people kill each other a lot more. Is there a causal relationship there? Could rich people do something about it? Well, better not to find out and make rich people feel bad.
Update: Eugene Robinson has a good Op/Ed on this in the Washington Post. And my co-workers are talking about it, which just confirms my "uncomfortable suburbanite" thesis.
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