One Utah

The Feb 25 episode of Cold Case, a repeat entitled Rampage, was one of the more frustrating episodes. While taking on the issue of teenage violence with a certain sensitivity, the show also illustrated the connection between power and sexuality - in a painful to watch scene in which the high school jokes gang rape an unpopular girl they refer to at the Butter girl - everything on her is great, but her face. It’s a cruel joke - realized in chilling detail as the jocks rape her, and she gets revenge by pushing two teenage shooters to go on a rampage in a shopping mall - one that kills 15. There’s no serious attempt in the episode to explore the motives of the shooters.

A few years back, there was an incident in Salt Lake where a lightning strike killed a student at a school. Watching the news that night, parents arrived at the school to get their kids and behaved like idiots - frantic, terrorized, crazed, so afraid for their kid. Alternatively, Americans are terrified of our children - that they’re packing heat and ready to kill us at a moment’s notice. On the TV news tonight, at least two stations are telling us about the threat online predators have for our children - waiting in the wings to seduce our children and destroy them. A few years back the fear was “stranger danger.” Then there’s the nonsense about “rainbow parties” - where kids supposedly get together for giant oral sex orgies (see snopes for a great debunking of this urban myth).

We can’t seem to decide if our kids are a threat to us or are threatened by us. Statistically speakng, our children are in far more danger from friends and family than online predators (we’re talking several orders of magnitude more danger from family than online strangers). Just as the stranger danger craze a few years back was embarrassingly wrongheaded (3% of kidnappings are committed by strangers - 97% of kidnappings are performed by family members or friends - estranged parents or grandparents are the most common perpetrators). Since Columbine, the gun-toting misfit teens are a pop culture staple. The two sides - that our children are hemmed in by terrifying strangers intent on corrupting them or they are an unfathomable threat to us.

I wonder if these extremes make some sort of sense, though. Like focusing on Britney Spears shaved head and pathetic attempts at rehab, or Anna Nicole Smith’s death and subsequent litigation, focusing on these real, but statistically improbable threats, allows us to avoid dealing with the very real issues. 1/3 of American children are living in poverty. High school and college athletes are rarely punished for their misdeeds - including rape and sexual assault (see the Duke rape case) - unless they attack the wrong girls. Missing white girls get plenty of coverage on the cable news networks. Missing African-American or Latina women - not so much. Social class in American society - rarely discussed - explains almost entirely the real disaster of Hurricane Katrina - the poor neighborhoods of New Orleans weren’t evacuated. Wealthier, whiter cities sure as hell were. NO’s Ninth Ward remains all but in ruins. But I’ll bet Tom Delay’s house is already rebuilt.

The extreme fears - improbable though real - are easy to focus on because the real dangers are even scarier. Who wants to admit that our society’s children are in more danger from our neighbors, from our priests, from our estranged ex-spouses or ex-inlaws than from a stranger on the other end of the computer? Very few people. Who wants to admit that attractive cheerleaders and handsome football players, with their brutal hazing of less popular students, are a greater threat to the well being our schools than the odd loner who has a gun? In the movie Heathers, Christian Slater’s character JD says, of the football captain and his sidekick, “The football season’s over, they’ve got nothing left to offer the school but AIDS jokes and date rape.” If I sound cynical, it’s because I am. The grotesquely misnamed “War on Drugs” has a track record for punishing the poor, the ethnic, the non-white, while carefully avoiding punishing the white, the wealthy, the connected. The Rush Limbaugh’s of the world, the George W. Bush’s can get treatment; the not so lucky, not so connected, not so powerful and wealthy, get jail.

So, yeah, it’s a cold case - more of a slow burn in our society waiting to explode. The distance between wealthy and poor growing each and every year encouraged and abetted by the media, the Chambers of Commerce, the corporate donors who support vast chunks of the American political establishment with their money. It’s not a simple matter of social injustic today - it is a matter of enshrining social injustice into the system while most of us look the other way and hope we do not get caught up in the whirlwind.

This entry was posted Sunday, February 25th, 2007 at 10:32 pm and is filed under 4th Estate (Media), Society, This Blog. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.