I suppose I should post this here, too

[womzilla]

The very smart and eloquent baldanders has a justly well-received post about people saying "what about this disaster or that, isn't it more important?" in response, specifically, to the destruction of the Columbia. You can read it here.

Since I wrote a post saying, in part, "what about this disaster or that", I felt that I should respond; my response is in his comments, but I felt that anyone who stumbled across my post on my page should see my dissembling further discussion of it. So, here 'tis.

Well, I made a comment almost certainly within the family of comments which inspired this article, and I can say that I don't recognize the impulses described therein operating within me. Perhaps they were there, and I don't recognize them, but I know that there were other impulses. At least one of my impulses does not reflect at all well on me; I felt that I was being battered by the world to feel deep, heart-rent grief over the loss, and that I was being somehow tarred as a failure for not caring more, so I lashed back with some snideness. I shouldn't have done that, and I apologize whole-heartedly for it.

More importantly, and slightly less selfishly I think, I was reacting badly to the saturation coverage given Columbia.

I believe the deaths of the seven people aboard Columbia were important. I don't think that they were so important that they should have crowded out everything else in the noosphere. Maybe for any particular person, they did not; they certainly did on the TV and radio while I was paying attention. Instead, there was hour after hour of virtually content-free talking heads. There was worthwhile coverage, but it was spread thinner than the stratosphere.

In the short term, I think that the deaths of the 17 (or 16; reports differ) people in the bus explosion in Kandahar is indicative of greater impending danger to me and those I love than the deaths of the seven astronauts on Columbia. This wasn't a random event I chose to mention because it had more dead people than Columbia and was thus self-evidently of irrefutable greater import than the mere seven casualties of Columbia. These deaths had a significance because they are indicative of the ongoing chaos in Afghanistan, of the degree to which progress is not being made in cleaning up the festering boil of the world, a situation which continues to have the potential to escalate into widespread violence.

The destruction of Columbia was horrible. I don't think that people are stupid, weak, blinkered, or deserving of condescension for being upset, and I wasn't trying to indicate that such was the case. If my post condescended, or imputed weakness or stupidity to anyone other than those who filled up the airwaves with empty chatter, then I am again sorry.

Comments

[supergee.livejournal.com]

There's always a kind of Winner-Takes-All quality to media news: This one is the Big Story; we'll tell you about until you scream. All those other stories aren't the Big Story, so we'll mention them in passing.

[firecat]

I make extra efforts to avoid news media when there are big stories, because I get so annoyed at how the big stories drown out all the other stories.