Columbine April 1999. I ran through back yards to get to the elementary school where parents were waiting to hear if their child was alive or dead. I saw scenes there that will be with me forever.
Why did I run down the creekbed and through yards? Because the media machine was already up and clogging the roadways within hours that day, helicopters in the sky rounding and rounding, satellite trucks parked willy nilly all over the road… ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, every small time and large news agency including incredibly intrusive print people thrusting small tape recorders into people’s faces asking ‘how do you feel?” “Didja think this would ever happen HERE?” and other profoundly vapid and unanswerable questions that were unwelcome and uninvited.
The sheriffs and police departments eventually had to take their time to push back the media onslaught that was so deep and so thick it was like the crammed parking lot at Stock Show. And the main media takeaway trumpeted across the nation was ONE INCH deep news, that by golly, everyone, just everyone was saying “How could this happen here?”
That wasnt what people were saying, people on the ground, the kids, the teachers, the police officers, the parents, the grandparents, the neighbors. THAT’S what the media made of it, cheap, fast, and off base.
Then came the literally years of the same film clips over and over and over and over. Kids running from the school like prisoners of war with hands over heads. Lance, trapped in the school with sign in window. The SWAT team rescuing him through a window, he badly wounded.
No one I know from Columbine watches those news clips. As a post trauma specialist, my first direction to the teachers and students I was brought in to counsel at Columbine was, do NOT talk to media, do NOT watch film, tv, internet, do NOT listen to radio, recordings, do not seek photos of the devastations.
Why? Who matters? Who the h— really matters? The media, lookie lous, people who get off on watching train wrecks, agony-tourism interests? No. And in the case of Sandy Hook parents, loved ones, community, also … the people who have suffered are the only ones who matter. Who is in such need of healing? The people who have suffered, first person, inner circle.
Who is in need of feeding the maw of 24 hour cycle of ‘news?’ The mainstream media. That ka-ching we hear is not a healing sound.
Whomsoever cares for the hearts and souls of others, has NO need to hear the torment of those 911 calls.
Are we truly healers of one another? Or wounders of those already wounded? I so hope it is the former.
No one in their right heart would stand outside the many years long grieving hall that is Sandy Hook, playing 911 phone calls on a loudspeaker.
Have mercy. True mercy. Move along. Nothing more to see here re the souls at Columbine, re the souls of Sandy Hook.
Leave the people to heal without their very new and very tenuous sutures constantly being ripped out by a media that claims you and I ‘have a right to know’, that you and I are the drivers, that is, we have a right to listen to others’ agony. No, mainstream media, you’re not serving me, not serving many many others by falsely claiming this is all ‘for us.’ It’s not. It’s for your coffers. Leave me out of this one.
I’ll pass on this one. I hope many others will also.
Let the souls of Sandy Hook heal without further indecent intrusions.