Woody Cavenaugh

I don't know when it happened but it happened. It seems to have taken place slowly over time. I don't even konw the moment where it began, everytime I think I found the beginning, I think of another.
-New Orleans getting flooded, 1.5 million washed out of their homes.
-The tsunami in South East Asia.
-9/11
-Columbine massacre
-Hurricane Floyd floods
Skip backwards a while...
-Jonestown Massacre
-Vietnam war images
Skip back further...way back further...
-Krakatoa
-Mount Vesuvius
-Pompeii
-Biblical Flood

As a species we just seem to be fascinated by death and destruction. We can't seem to get enough of it. When I sat down here I was going to take a blind stab at the media being to blame but that is clearly not the case. The media is just giving the humans what the humans want.

I've done it, you've done it, we've all done it. We sit eagerly eating up every piece of information available about great loss of property and or life. Thanks to the tool, media, we can sit in front of the tube or the internet and get piped to us 24/7. Again, I'm not blaming media any more than I am calling the entire human race a bunch of sicko's who enjoy the suffering of others. I'm just making an observation here. The next time you are in front of a public TV that is showing some sort of disaster (thanks to CNN or FOX News), peel your eyes away from the tube long enough to look at the faces of the people around you. There will be one or two looking like you expect them to look, like you think you are looking yourself, but the fact is most of them are going to be excited by what they see. Almost gleeful.

Just yesterday standing in a convenience store I heard someone say, "Wow, that is amazing, I hope the whole city floods!" They had no idea how that sounded, and neither did the person they were talking to. For them the flooding of New Orleans was little more than an extra long episode of "24" or something. Let me tell on myself. I saw some footage of a car that went speeding into flood waters on I-10, stall, and start to float away. Some good Samaritan went running out to get the guy out of the car and I turned to Sara and I said, "What an idiot!". As you can imagine, she didn't forgive me for my heartlessness. As the man was pulled from the car it was obvious he was old, and as Sara was quick to point out, scared, and panicked. He probably lived in New Orleans his whole life and simply didn't know what to do. (As it turned out Sara was right on all counts.)

That doesn't make us (me and the guy in the convenience store) bad people mind you. Put all of mankind on a bell curve we would have saints at the bottom right, psychopathic child molesting racest canibals on the bottom left and the big bell curve would define the typical person. The typical person gets excited about this sort of thing. I suppose the draw of it is that if doesn't directly affect them, i.e. them or someone they know aren't directly affected, it isn't real, just entertainment on a grand "Wrath of God" scale. When the various civic and charity groups put out the call for inflatable boats and bottled water, these are the same people who are going to donate. When they get home at night they will probably turn on the TV and stare excitedly watching the coverage of the relief efforts too.

Its just an observation, do with it as you will.