A Life Matters More Than A Murder

As I think about the recent death of the a young American man who was visiting Greece, my reactions waver from shock at the brutality and senselessness of these types of crimes to anger at the sensationalism which surrounds murder in our culture, sensationalism which has been created and propagated by the media. News outlets have always dramatized tragedies in such a way as to solicit more viewers for longer periods of time, but I didn't give it much thought until now. Instead of celebrating a person's life, we pick apart their final moments, criticizing their choices in a situation that they had no control over. Often, we criticize everything else about their lives while we're at it.

This is a very short post because I want to make my point and then leave it there so that I don't inadvertently join in the sensationalist-culture. Mostly, I just hope that by using the Internet to express my disdain for sensationalist journalism in this specific area, I might make someone else think twice before drawing conclusions about a stranger's life from articles written by people who didn't even know em and wasn't there when they died.

The last thing I'll say is this: an incredible young man or woman who found himself or herself in the wrong place at the wrong time should be remembered only as being an incredibly young man or woman. If you want to criticize someone, criticize the perpetrator or the larger cultural issues or biological-psychological mysteries which allow for these crimes to occur in the first place, despite our continuing evolution into a further-civilized world. Criticize that, and maybe even try to do something about it.