Left Speechless...
...aren't you?
I’m paraphrasing a real news headline from today: ‘11-year-old accused of premeditated murder in 5-year-old brother’s death.’
There are moments when a headline stops being information and becomes a mirror, one that most of us would rather not look into. There are moments when the words themselves feel impossible to say, or even to think, when our brains realize they should never coexist in the same sentence, let alone describe something that has actually happened. And yet they do.
And yet they did.
When reality presents us with something so profoundly wrong, so violently out of alignment with what we believe humanity should be capable of, I think the only honest response is to pause, and to feel the shock in our bones. I think we need to sit in the silence that follows, the kind of silence that steals breath and language alike.
Why? Because this isn’t just about one event; it’s about the slow, unsettling realization that something in us - collectively, culturally, even spiritually - is fraying. The once unthinkable is now becoming thinkable. The boundaries we always assumed were, in theory, unbreakable are now, in fact, paper-thin.
This all forces a question that is as uncomfortable as it is necessary:
What the fuck is happening to us?
Not to “them,” not to “those people” - to US.
Do we even have an answer? And if we don’t like the answer, then the next question becomes even more urgent:
What can - and will - we do differently?
Not ‘someday.’ Not just when it’s convenient, and not when someone else takes the lead, but NOW, in the quiet reckoning, that follows the shock, in the space within us where grief and responsibility should meet.
Headlines like this should never be part of our world - not now, not ever.
And if we want a world where such headlines are unthinkable again, that will not happen by accident. It will happen because individuals, ordinary people, you and I, choose to live, act, and care in ways that push humanity back toward itself.
This moment, this very moment, demands nothing less.
(There were a number of news articles this week involving the deaths of children at the hands of other children. We all need to step back and ask ourselves why this is happening. There are no easy answers.)
There's something specifically important about naming the silence instead of rushing to explain the headline. "Sit in the silence that steals breath and language alike" — that's not avoidance, that's the beginning of actually reckoning with it.
Thank you for not reaching for easy framing.
— @lintara
In the USA, we've normalized violence to such an extent with our movies, TV, music, and especially video games that young people who cannot yet fully comprehend the consequences of their actions have become completely desensitized to it. Our mass media needs to clean up its act as it's now impossible for parents to control their kids' media usage like it was 25 years ago.
Is violence so common in other countries' media? If not, that's probably a major reason why other countries don't have this problem.