Fighting Invisible Monsters

I have bug bites in the most random locations. I don't even know where the bugs came from. Some people wake up to the sound of mosquitoes buzzing in their ears--not I. If they're around, I don't see or hear them. The only bugs I see are the fruit flies that were thriving on an empty carton of Thai leftovers buried deep in my trash bin until I took it out this week.

(If most of your trash is kleenex, you can crush it down almost indefinitely. Tip of the week.)

Anyway, I've had bug bites/pimples/god knows what on my knuckle, elbow, mid-back along the spine, and cheek. The one on my cheek was particularly odd, as it hadn't swelled or begun to itch when I found it.

Why am I writing about minor bug bites? I had a topic, for reals. It's just escaping me now.

In ethics yesterday, the grader, in our prof's absence, lead a discussion about coverage of Columbine and similar trauma situations. (Isn't it strange how readily we interchange "trauma" and "tragedy?" The words have different meanings, but you wouldn't know that to look at most headlines. Something traumatic occurred. Let's jazz it up and call it a tragedy because we have pictures of people in tears. So much for objective journalism.) I found it a little difficult to say my piece when the woman was quite clearly moved to emotion about the subject--I'm simply not.

I mean, I can see why people covering it day in and day out would be moved. I can see how it's moving. It's fucking scary and terrible and having to look at images of kids being pulled out of windows and diving under desks for weeks at a time, having your car surrounded by angry citizens, constantly being pressured to harass those who lost someone? Yeah, that's crappy. And it's worth discussing.

But at the same time, what the fuck!

The vocal qualities of some of my classmates makes me not want to say anything at all. Theirs is the voice of self-important authority. It's my biased perception, sure, but it doesn't make me want to say what I'm thinking: "I don't need fucking Katie Couric to come to my hometown when it's insane and tell me and all of America how terrible it is. I don't need it glossed over with fanfare, pomp and circumstance, on the evening news. I don't need to answer the call when a big name wants a quote." I totally felt for the local journalists; they were getting fucked. And I can't say that. It's hard for me to formulate these thoughts on the fly and verbally.

Why is it, self-important authoritative voice, that it was wrong for the students, parents, and faculty to want to control the message? How is it blocking news or making people forget if they don't show images and name names of the perpetrators on the one-year anniversary? Why can't it for once be the news to present the story as "these people were traumatized" and not "those fuck-ups did the traumatizing"?

I wish my prof had been there for the discussion. He's the same prof I had for Advanced Newswriting, and trauma reporting is his thing. Our trauma unit was, to some extent, his pet project. It was strongly emphasized that to be more responsible reporters, we should give less power to the perpetrators of trauma and more to the victims. It's a complicated issue, but one I would have liked to have my prof to direct a little.

Maybe I'm a little too interested in compassion to be a hardcore reporter. That's never been my intent, anyway. Compassion, to me, is not just crying when something is difficult. Objectivity is useless. If the "truth" the people want to hear is a rehash of terrible events and not the harsh reality of the present, fuck them.

Of course, I speak with a voice of no authority. Just an opinion and, apparently, a differing set of ethics to most of my classmates.

Truth be told, I don't remember any of the trauma coverage of Columbine. I refused to watch more than five minutes of 9/11 on CNN. I wanted everyone to stick a sock in it with the OJ Simpson case. It's not that I don't care about these things--well, I didn't give two shits about the Simpson case--I just don't feel the need to reexamine them for months on end. There is so much happening in the world that it seems disastrously short-sighted to have so much attention called toward just one thing. It becomes a collection of images and sound bites--low signal-to-noise--a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

We ask for meaning, but we just want a message.

And why am I majoring in journalism, anyway, if I don't want to be a journalist?

Good question.

I quit Children's. After one week. I don't know why, exactly, I just decided it was not a place for me to be. I have no desire to go into clinical work, and moreover, I have no desire to take the bus to Sand Point every Tuesday. Lazy? Yes.

I need to find a real internship; I need to get a passport; I need to make plans. I need to get organized; I need to start cooking again. But I do have tickets to see Built to Spill on the 17th and Death Cab for Cutie on the 21st of November; Kevin has tickets to see Beulah on Saturday. A month with at least three concerts can't be all wasted.