Gun Control & RKBA
Related: About this forumGun violence’s toll a relentless form of terror
To even ask that question, to draw the comparison, may seem almost sacrilegious. Yet it is being asked, particularly in Boston’s communities of color, by some who look at the extraordinary consideration given to those who suffered in the bomb blasts — the best of health care, millions of dollars of donations — and wonder why the same treatment, resources, and concern have not come their way. One Boston, they wonder, or two?
There are reasons why April 15, 2013, was sui generis for Boston. Yet there should be lessons too: Sometimes, out of the media spotlight and largely unseen, it’s too easy to ignore the daily tragedies occurring in our backyards. Just because they’re commonplace shouldn’t make them acceptable.
The impact, the importance, of the bombings lies not simply in the number of lives lost. If body count were the measure of a calamity, then the Texas fertilizer plant explosion, which occurred just two days later and killed many more, would have captured much more attention. It didn’t, nor did numerous horrendous events that have occurred since then, such as last week’s sinking of a South Korean ferry that may have left as many as 300 dead.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/columns/2014/04/19/one-boston-not-areas-plagued-gun-violence/T5D3U4KUUsHzDKxPFnWINP/story.html
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pscot
(21,024 posts)
Nuclear Unicorn
(19,497 posts)is to be prohibited.
blueridge3210
(1,401 posts)Swede Atlanta
(3,596 posts)No one with any power, including the media, care anything about people or their suffering. I realize I am generalizing but if you look at the focus of the news today it is all about sensationalism.
Yes, the attack on the Boston Marathon was "news". It was an attack at a very public event and the developing story about the suspects and their eventual death or capture mesmerized the nation.
But it is about selling ads. The recent tragedy in South Korea will be in the news only as long as it attracts eyeballs and ad dollars. Once that is gone you will never hear another word about it.
But let's be clear. The majority of the runners and the entire framework of the Marathon was Caucasian. These were white people being attacked and killed.
We are a nation or robots that react when the media want us to react. We have no ability to act outside of that paradigm except for the advent of social media. I do believe that social media was instrumental in the Arab Spring. I think it will serve us well going forward as we want to usher in a different kind of world. But we can no longer rely on corporate-owned media to do anything other than serve their financial interests which is to sell ads.
Eleanors38
(18,318 posts)Clearly, it is not sacrilegous to discuss the deaths of minorities, only the more casual and acceptable forms of racial bias leave these deaths off the national agenda; sadly, people relate to the deaths of "their own kind" more than to the deaths of "other kinds," and about 2/3 of Americans are "white."
It IS "sacrilegous" to discuss who is killing minorities -- usually minorities -- lest one be tagged as an active and malevolent racist; better we cast blame on the instrumentality of homocide than on who is causing the mayhem and why.
This allows for indulgence in both forms of racial bias in accordance with ones instant moral outrage and political expedience.
