Two News Stories from the Weekend
1. It can be tempting to look at the very sad death of a Wal-Mart worker during Black Friday as some sort of indictment on consumerism or capitalism or corporate policy, but I think that would be as misguided as using the Who concert tragedy to indict Rock and Roll. We can draw more meaning from the thousands of stores on Black Friday that had no problems and the thousands of rock concerts that left their fans safe and satisfied. (Excluding Creed fans, of course). But if we need to look somewhere for answers with regard to the Wal-Mart tragedy, I’d probably go with the psychology of the mob combined with weak or poor authority figures, and I’d cite the Stanford prison study and the Milgram experiment for a reference point.
2. There was a story in the news about a couple having sex in public at an Iowa Hawkeyes football game. The woman was a 38 year-old married woman with three kids, and the man was a 26 year-old that wasn’t her husband. The man was apparently attending the game with his girlfriend. Apparently, and not surprisingly, the incident has temporarily ruined this woman’s life. (Not surprisingly, it seems to have had less of a devastating affect on the man). I find it terribly unfortunate that this story has made its way to the national news. Did they do something wrong? Yes. Should people be allowed to have sex in public bathrooms? Probably not. Should this make them national jokes? I don’t think so. Fifty years ago, if something like had happened, the press wouldn’t have reported it. It’s probably better that way. There would still be the shame and the personal repercussions … they’d still have to try to make rectify their relations with their loved ones … they’d still bear the personal shame of their actions. But to deal with national humiliation? … that seems too much for their offense. There are murderers and rapists whose stories never filter beyond the local press. But these two people, who had sex at a football game?—their story is everywhere, though their crime is relatively trivial. When we read their story, it feels wrong … voyeuristic. Moreover, by thrusting these people into the news, we’re thrusting their families and relations into the news, and they didn’t deserve this.
(Now, in the latest news, it seems the woman is claiming some kind of foul play, suggesting that she might have been drugged. If this is true, then what happened isn’t relatively trivial, it’s absolutely awful. But this aspect of the story came later … it didn’t drive the national coverage of the incident.)
