A shooting rampage in Alabama leaves ten people dead….16 dead in a school shooting in Germany….the news was pretty grim yesterday, the sort of fare the 24-hour cable TV news outlets dine on. At the beginning of each half-hour, staid-faced reporters and reporterettes intone moribund updates from scenes where news took place hours before.
The most commonly-used cliché in so many of the reports I saw and heard was the phrase “trying to make sense of it”….as in “the people of this small Alabama town are trying to piece their lives back together and make sense of the horrible tragedy that unfolded here just hours ago”.
Attention, news dweebs: you CAN’T make sense of it. This is a man who shot his mother and her dogs, and then set her house on fire and went on a killing spree. I does NOT make sense and you CANNOT make sense of it. It is INSANE behavior. The young man who killed the people in the school in Germany picked mostly female victims to shoot. NO, we DON’T know why. He was INSANE. We can’t “make sense of it”.
In a little over a month, we’ll have to endure countless “news” reports about the tenth anniversary of the Columbine killings in April of ‘99. (Of course, though, the semi-literate news dweebs will say “ten-year anniversary”.) We will be exposed to all manner of weak and effusively sentimetal stories about how life has changed in the small Colorado town in the past decade; how the people have picked up the pieces of their lives and moved on as best they can; and perhaps the question “how could this have happened here” will even be answered for us by one of the newsies.
To me, too often grim news is made worse by dweebs who think spewing clichés is reporting.
I think Chris Rock said it best, when he talked about the Columbine massacre and the media's attempts to explain the shooters' motives: "Whatever happened to 'crazy'?"
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