Littleton, Earshot and lots of flaming I don't have time to follow the newsgroup regularly anymore unfortunately, but I dropped in yesterday to skim the responses to the banning of Earshot, and was driven a bit nuts so I decided to flame to clear my brain a little bit. I haven't even come close to reading every post on the subject, just the few from the posters I tend to like and skimming the threads they responded to, so I probably missed lots of major points, but what the hell, it's usenet, right? What, exactly, are we supposed to be mourning in the Littleton killings? I have heard lots of sentimental claptrap about the tragedy of lives cut short. If that's a reason to pull an episode and cause a weeklong nationwide ruckus, we should be doing it every week. In 1995, 1700 children aged 16 or younger were murdered (source, fbi uniform crime report, http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/Cius_97/Welcome.pdf). In 1996, 1500. In 1997, 1300. Even at the 1997 rate, that's 25 children a week being murdered (and those are only the cases identified as such by the FBI, not including negligent death). That is close to double the number killed in Littleton. Every week. Where are their 5000 person funerals? Where is their TV coverage? Why do we not honor them? In 1993, the Chicago Tribune ran a series where they documented the murder of every child under 15 in the Chicago area. (http://chicagotribune.com/news/metro/chicago/ws/0,1246,18681,00.html) By the end of the year, that was 65 children. By 1998, one third of those killers were already free. (http://chicagotribune.com/news/metro/chicago/ws/item/0,1267,18681-18664-18666,00.html) I thought this was a great effort, because it made people think about how much grief and misery we sweep under the rug every day. Those children had parents who grieved every bit as much as the Littleton parents. They probably weren't as photogenic, they probably didn't have the outrage of it having in a suburb, but does that make the emotion any less? If the tragedy was in the youth turned murderers, I refer again to the FBI crime report - approximately 1300 murderers under 17 in 1995, 1500 in 1997. And I'd suspect a good portion of their victims were also children. Basically, this is an exercise in hypocrisy. We are mourning Littleton because the media is telling us it's a big deal. We ignore inner city deaths because it doesn't even make the nightly news any more. Any of the reasons I've seen for honoring Littleton's deaths apply just as well to the hundreds of children murdered each year that get ignored by the national media. Why should it be more of a tragedy because it happened to photogenic, middle-class suburban folks? Yes, I'm callous and unsympathetic. But at least I'm consistently callous and unsympathetic. I go on living my life despite the fact that people and children get murdered probably every day somewhere in the US. I could devote my life to trying to fix that, but I neither have the drive nor the power to make a difference. I'm certainly not going to mourn something because the media tells me to. To bring this all back to Buffy, I, of course, disagree with the decision not to air Earshot. I know nothing about the plot beyond the fact that it involves a student planning a mass killing. But I suspect that he does not, in fact, succeed in it. And, possibly, Buffy and the gang find a way for helping him deal with his conflict in a way other than killing his fellow students. If that is the case (and I don't know if it is), it would actually be a great episode to air to show kids alternate ways of dealing. If nothing else, I think it shows how the Buffy writers have a good hand on the pulse of American teenagers - the number of kids who have thoughts of doing violence to their abusive classmates is legion (look at the slashdot accounts - http://slashdot.org/articles/99/04/25/1438249.shtml). And as for fears of copycat incidents because of Buffy, that's just ridiculous. Not that it wouldn't happen, but that it could be any worse than devoting a full week's worth of smothering coverage to the incident. I have heard that there have been many bomb scares throughout the U.S. already - I don't see how Buffy could have made it any worse. Kids now realize that if they kill their classmates, they're going to get way more than their 15 minutes of fame - it could be a whole week's worth! What better reward for the kid who's been ignored and mocked all his life? Okay. I feel a little better now. Let the flaming commence. -- Eric Nehrlich, who realizes, once again, why he ignores the news media http://www.sfis.com/personal/eric