There was a train wreck last Sunday morning on Amtrack. Four people were killed. We have had auto accidents in this city with higher death tolls that didn’t make the Six O’clock News, but this accident, mainly because it was a TRAIN WRECK shut down every major news source to everything else that happened that day. This is a symptom, an indication of why our entire nation is willing to give up its freedoms and wallow in fear over the possibility of a terrorist act, any terrorist act, regardless of import. I realize that for the victims and their families this event was a catastrophe of major proportions but in the realm of the catastrophic world, this was not a major event.
Those who remember the reactions to Newtown and Boston, both much more serious occurrences, will recall that our news systems shut down to anything else that was happening in the world for the next few days, as every cub reporter in the system fought desperately for his two minutes of air time.
The nature of the area where the train left the tracks is such that it was difficult to get camera teams close to the scene, so the TV audience, was treated to the same telephoto shots over and over as young reporters whose lack of arthritis allowed them to go out on a freezing morning and try desperately to find something new or at least vaguely interesting to say about what had already been covered repeatedly, came up with the same drivel over and over, ad nauseum.
This pathetic attempt at holding the attention of the same audience that patronizes schlock horror films, forces one to wonder about the intelligence of not just the media, but the entre American viewing public. At one point, at least four hours after the crash, the scene was stable; the first responders had done an admirable job of clearing the victims and seemingly establishing the stability of the wrecked cars. Now the scene was moribund, large groups of uniformed firemen stood around waiting for someone to have the initiative to send them back to a firehouse, where they might have been needed for another emergency, but afraid that some small occurrence would happen at the scene and they, the commanders, would be accused of not giving this TV moment its full importance, no one acted.
And still we watched, and why? I think it’s basically an unreasoned fascination, one in which we put ourselves into the situation and thrill to the rush of fear that it gives us. I think it’s this same fear that has turned us from a nation of heroes into a nation of cowards over the terrorist problem.
It’s interesting that through it all, the networks never stopped showing their commercials so we were treated to the revelation by BP of what a great a job they are doing, rebuilding the gulf that they destroyed by creating another catastrophe, even as we watch this catastrophe of much less import. Of course the networks thought it was important to cancel all other programming so we could watch the overblown coverage of this, not particularly significant, rail accident, but when it came to the Jets game all bets were off. The Jets appeared magically from the wreckage and, well, actually they have their own wreckage problem, nothing as serious as what was happening at Spuyten Duval, of course, but the networks seemed to think it was at least as important and besides, the commercial minutes paid better.
What is wrong with us? Why do we sit staring at a repeating image while ill equipped reporters with too much air-time and not enough information create hypothetic situations out of a lack of input, mainly because they have to fill the screen with something. It was much the same at both the Newtown massacre and the Boston bombing when reporters forced to keep talking but with nothing to say, began to create their own stories out of thin air. This is why an innocent man was almost shot in Boston as a co-conspirator.
It’s the same with all catastrophic situations. The media, desperate to hold our interest with far too little information and far too much time to fill; the process of conjecture begins. This leads to the creation of myths that bear little relation to reality and soon the public is scared out of its wits and ready to give up everything we hold dear, to those who claim that they will protect us from the media created bogeymen. Of course they can’t protect us, as has been seen in Newtown, Boston and any number of other disasters, all they can do is clean up afterward and hopefully catch the perpetrators, but they don’t care about that. What they acre about most, is power and that, the people are willing to cede them, because they think, they are unable to protect themselves.
With the exception of one instance, 911, we have been singularly successful in avoiding any terrorist event of much significance on American soil. This has been due to a level of functionality exhibited by our own security forces and a great deal of incompetence by the terrorists. The fact is that we do a great deal more violent damage to ourselves every day than any terrorists could possibly imagine doing to us. So why the hell are we giving up our privacy and our freedoms to the government to protect us? If our military and intelligence agencies can’t protect us without listening to our phone conversations and photographing us in our beds and toilets, they have to be replaced with someone who can.
The NSA brags of a history of plots foiled and terrorists whisked away to seclusion, but offers no proof. They can’t they claim, be specific, because it would endanger national security for us to have even a hint about the secret arts that they practice. Sure it would, and I have a bridge that you are going to love owning. The CIA has such a sterling record of protecting the country from any number of our enemies that it chills the soul to even contemplate the idea that to some extent we are in their fumbling hands. I know, I know, they tracked down bin Laden… and, wonder of wonders, it only took them ten years. They did find out about the fall of communism but only after the Germans were already selling pieces of the Berlin wall as souvenirs to Japanese tourists.
I really think it’s time that our government realized that the terrorists are over there someplace and maybe if we stop trying to find them here, we will be a lot more successful. Maybe if we also laid back a bit on the creation of new terrorists; those who had once been members of happy families that were now collateral damage from our overkill efforts to kill some suspected terrorist, and concentrated on just killing the terrorists themselves, we would also be a lot better off. That would probably entail shifting some of the assets that we are wasting here, to over there, wherever that is.
The level of sophisticated tools available to our security forces is mindboggling. They are able to do things that we only dreamed about a few short years ago. It’s now time for us to use those tools in other countries, on people who are actually seeking to do ham to the United States and to stop wasting time and vast amounts of money on surveillance of Americans who would like to support our security mechanism, but who kept from doing that by their intense respect for, and a strong desire to retain, their freedoms under the constitution.