America can’t keep things in perspective any more.
A tragedy like the Boston Marathon bomb blast happens – and it seems the world grinds to a halt. The Internet, television, and the rest of the press turn on the story like a piranha having lunch.
The 15 minutes of new news each day is stretched, inflated, blown out of proportion, to fill the entire day. Again and again, over and over.
Until a possibly ricin-tainted letter shows up in a senator’s mail…which preoccupies us for awhile…
Until that’s trumped by a second such letter addressed to…the President.
And then a third, to another senator. And then the Boston bomber is caught…and then not.
Mad infinitum…
Each of these is a big story. But they feed on one another – 1+1 equaling 3. The 24/7 coverage since Monday’s bombing isn’t very illuminating. It also does little to nurture the resilience for which the American character has long been admired.
As Doyle McManus noted in Wednesday’s Los Angeles Times, you’re more like to die in your bathtub than at the hands of terrorists.
It’s a safe bet each of these acts was committed by a lone wolf, now glorying in our focused attention.
“We must try to find ways to starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend,” Margaret Thatcher – whose funeral was held Wednesday in London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral – told the American Bar Association in 1985.
Why do we allow such pipsqueak psychopaths to dictate our daily discourse?