The Pecan Park Eagle

How long are we going to continue treating a stolen auto as breaking news?

Unless you are a home-in-the-daytime person who enjoys television, you’ve probably missed this one, so far, but it does strike in the evening too upon occasion, and lately, it seems, it seems to hit every night during the scheduled news hours of the Channels 2, 11, and 13 local news programs in Houston.

That is, that scheduled programming that some of us have tuned in to see is preempted suddenly and offensively by some kind of “all out” coverage of an event the stations like to bill as “breaking news.” Today it was the mysterious stabbings that crazily broke out at Lone Star College on their Cypress campus. The local stations were on that event for at least two hours with helicopter shots of cars parked on campus, roving reporters interviewing students for their fifteen seconds of fame, and watching the hospitals for the arrival of casualties that never seemed to materialize.

Meanwhile, our intended shows and time were allowed to just slip away. Way beyond the time it took for us to get the “news” of what had happened in this already contained situation, one of the anchor ladies had the doo-doo dippity-brain audacity to ask one student on remote call this thoughtful question: “Was the person who stabbed your friend the same person who was running around campus stabbing other people?”

DUH!

The sad facts are these: (1) We have become a violent culture in which people who cannot cope often simply express their discomfort by lashing out randomly at others; and (2) We are also a gristly, self-centered culture in which some people do all kinds of unconscionable things to their children, spouses, other family members, lovers, friends, strangers, and themselves, using some sickly reasoned basis as their justification.

Each day produces new examples of the same diseased well-spring, but is it any longer news that it happens? Do we really need to reenforce on a daily basis through our newscasts and frequent entertainment program blackouts the idea that the only thing that happens in our American cities is this overflowing toilet of human meanness to self and others? I don’t think so. And I really hope not.

Violence is an ongoing threat to public welfare, of course, and please use these same broadcasting tools to help bring a bad situation to a better conclusion, but don’t helicopter hover like media buzzards over a the site of a student’s mental illness breakdown once the threat to other students and the general public has been secured. The inanity of the questions asked by some of these so-called electronic journalists is almost as painful as the stabbing wounds themselves – and it contributes little to nothing to our deeper understanding of human behavior at its worst.

School violence is no longer news. It is another manifestation of our unresolved national sickness.

As for happy, though unlikely, news stories, how about waiting for these:

“Congress solves country’s tax and social program gridlock; Most now put USA ahead of personal interests.”

“Governor Perry Retires; Will Open ‘Aggies Only Malt Shop’ on the UT Drag in Austin.”

“Astros Win Their First World Series in Four-Game Sweep of the Cubs.”

“Domezilla Re-Opens as World’s Largest Classic Horror Movie Theatre.”

“Regular Annual Rainfall and Cooler Temps Restore Houston to Garden Spot of the World title.”

And while we are waiting for those nice or funny dreams that may likely never hatch, let’s dig a little deeper for good news, and whole news, and any news of what we are actually doing, if anything, to better understand and effect some kind of change in the aberrant pattern that now tragically and regularly hatches into a Sandy Hook level horror show.

My guess is that we are not doing much because, to do so, we will have to engage all of the already politically charged elements that make up our dance to each of these “deranged assassin” moments: The Bill of Rights, the 2nd Amendment, the NRA, Gun Lobbyists and Opponents, Our American Family concepts, Education, Parenting, etc. As a problem awaiting solution, the prevention of gun violence is one of our shakiest Jacob’s Ladders of social challenge.

And today in Houston wasn’t even about gun violence. It was about knife violence. Almost anything can be used as a weapon of some type. Still, once discovered and contained, it wasn’t news. It was just another variation on an ugly theme of contemorary life in America.

That’s as far as I can take my unhappiness with what passes for news today in one sitting. If we watch another 1,000 stories like today’s from Lone Star College, or if we are shown another 10,000 convenience store shootings, or if we watch another 100,000 older citizens sitting on their front porches in undershirts after the police arrive to investigate another home invasion, it will not solve anything – and it will not be news.

Now, if we could learn what really caused the young man who did this thing at Lone Star today to act as he did, that would be news, but that does not justify turning the airways into an open-ended pictorial on the scene of the crime simply because the director of this show is in competition for viewers among the local media channels.