The Anchoress
So, ISIS has beheaded a second US Journalist, and I am marveling at how much less attention is being paid to the grisly and unjust murder of Steven J. Sotloff.
James Foley’s murder shocked the nation, and in the midst of our insta-read-insta-forget culture of news absorption, his story survived a week’s worth of news cycles, which is remarkable when you consider how quickly we consign stories to the memory hole and move on to the next big thing. Ebola? Is that still going on? What do you mean there are still people dying on that mountain? I thought that was all over! The president said! Wow, the displaced Iraqis are still displaced? Well, the papers aren’t covering, so, I figured…hey, look, Jennifer Lawrence got hacked. Oooo! Stories about nudity!
I suspect one reason the Foley story got as much play as it did was because he was a journalist, and so shocked journalists wanted to keep talking about it. But Sotloff was also a journalist, and yet the media seem comparatively quiet.
I wonder if the Sotloff story is being told in whispers rather than shouts among the press because they are simply shocked and frightened. Fear can make us lash out, wildly, like this fellow, or it can make us pull inward and go silent, out of a need for self-protection. When I feared monsters, as a child, I would keep very still, eyes closed, head turned away.
Is that what we’re doing at the news of Steve Sotloff’s brutal death, come so hard on the heels of James Foley’s, and brought forward with the name of ISIS’ planned “next” victim? Are we simply going quiet and pulling inward, in fear, and hoping that at some point, someone will schedule some hearings, turn on the light, and make the monsters go away, or at least turn them into “a manageable problem”.
Rendering the Monsters of ISIS into “a manageable problem” sounds like allowing them space to create a “new normal” to which the world will have to adapt. When beheaded journalists become the new normal, they will barely garner a headline, because oh, look! Kate Upton and Ricky Gervais are fighting about nude photos in the cloud. And seriously, what is up with Kim Kardashian’s dress?
Decades of network news broadcasts — as penetrating as prop knives as they jumped from 30-second crisis soundbites to tape of surfing parrots and celebrity gossip — have trained us into this short-attention span theater of instant-distraction. But we really can’t afford to keep flipping the dial, clicking the mouse and slipping into the internet oblivion which has become our self-medication and our soma.
Making my living on the internet, I surely know its power, and the good it can do. I also understand how easily it can draw away our attention, diminish our awareness and suck us into a vortex of narrow interests and echo chambers that can completely distort our perceptions about what is real, and important, and what is not.
I’m as guilty of clicking my way into oblivion as anyone. We need breaks in our news consumption, need to find a laugh, need to feed on beauty when and where we can.
But increasingly, I get the sense that we can’t afford to indulge in too much of that; when we must look away, we can’t afford to get lost in it, but must click back into reality, and re-focus there. We must keep aware.
Perhaps in this moment our new normal is to only give a damn about a story for a day. But if that is the case, then every time we look up from our screen, there will be another new normal to adapt to.
Apparently, we will adapt.
UPDATE:
Kathryn Jean Lopez was on a similar wavelength, but has managed to remind us that there are good things to notice, amid all the bad:
Even in the midst of terror, if we keep watering the seeds of faith, hope, and love, grace abides and light can be seen. As long as we keep looking, and keep from looking away.
Read the whole thing.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In