Random thought/observation...

While pulling Emma duty the other night I watched a documentary called “The Execution of Michael Johnson”. The film was about a death row inmates last 24 hours leading up to his death sentence by way of lethal injection. While the normal anti vs. pro death penalty would seem to be the angle of the special it actually was the legal scrambling by Mr. Johnson’s attorney and the in depth look at the families of both the victim and the accused and how they were handling the oncoming grief of past and future family loss. As the viewer I was intrigued by Michael Johnson’s unrepentant attitude and ever changing story of how he was either not at the scene of the crime or how the accomplice was the actual shooter. He was linked by DNA and other incriminating evidence that did not seem to sway him and his claim of innocence or his claim that his friend was the real murderer. It was hard to watch, to see a sister and mother lament over a loved one whom they had had no physical contact with for over ten years and the woman who lost her husband only three weeks after their wedding. But again this is not why I watched. I watched the entire thing because of the shock value of the entire documentary. I was drawn in to see what the killer had to say for himself. To see if he would take advantage of his last hours on earth to recant, to confess, to say he was sorry and to make amends to those in his family and the family if the victim. But he didn’t. Hours before he was scheduled to die he took his own life. He even took his own blood and scrawled “I didn’t do it”. The victim’s family called him a coward. His sister called him brave. I was so taken in by this story. But why?

So I began to think. It might be for the same reason that I watch COPS and shows of the same nature. Of course there are so many variations of this type of reality tv. Everything from MTV’s salacious, inappropriate and mind numbing ‘The Real World’ to the sometimes horrific-endings of ‘The World‘s Scariest Police Chases‘. These all seem to cater to our “I can’t seem to stop staring” mentality. We see the guy who gets pulled over for allegedly driving drunk and snicker at something that might be said by the driver because he had too much to drink or the visit to the household plagued by domestic abuse where the house looks virtually unlivable and we are more shocked by the family‘s living conditions rather than the sad circumstance of the broken home. We know that the end of these stories are sad . They end with some guy in jail or the spouse with the black eye pressing charges against the other spouse or a car crashing into a pole and running off an embankment. Shock. Shock. Shock. Columbine. OJ Simpson. The recent live on air helicopter collision in Arizona which resulted in the deaths of four men (both helicopters were filming a police chase). The tsunamis in Asia. Soccer riots. The Virginia Tech massacre. The fall of the Trade Towers. All these things have been played over and over again on the television and we watch and we watch. These are real events that exist in the world we live in and yet there seems to be an air of apathy or some sort of disconnect with the seriousness of it all. But what if that were to happen to me? What if a plane collided with the IDS Center (our tallest building in Minneapolis) or someone close to me was pulled over for driving drunk or there was an incident involving a loved one who was experiencing domestic assault? I would be heart broken. What if someone filmed these events and showed them to me and the rest of America? How often would I watch these shows if they all involved someone close to me? I wonder if the harm caused by tv is worse than previously thought. What will we do when tragedy comes to our doorstep? While I accuse no one but myself of watching some of these shows I wonder what all this reality tv and “live” footage is doing for us as a society. Do other countries have this type of programming? Would “Baghdad’s Scariest Car Bombings” be a huge hit on Iraqi tv? I will step out on a limb and say “probably not”. Why is this? I don’t have an answer. But in this case I don’t think that I need an answer to know that something is wrong with all of this. Are we becoming worse than desensitized? Are we a people who have grown to love tragedy and failure?
Just another incomplete thought of mine. Maybe I will connect all the dots at a later time.

J