Tabloid Journalism and Thankfulness

November 1, 2007: I'm writing on our college discussion board about limited card swipe access to dorms. Another ongoing topic of focus is the JK Rowling declaration that Dumbledore was gay. Somewhere else, a college student is murdered; another student displays some reportedly "odd" behavior.

The next 3.7 years: I study politics, economics, sociology, more, graduating in June of 2011. Somewhere else, as written later that month:
She continues to study Italian (which she now speaks fluently, with occasional sallies into jailhouse vernacular), reading textbooks from cover to cover three times each. She has also become proficient in German and French, and is studying Japanese, Chinese and Russian. She is devouring the Western canon, and lists in her journals each book she completes. She has become something of a specialist in Existentialism (Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, Sartre's No Exit and Nausea), Magical Realism (Calvino, Borges, Eco), Absurdism and Despair (Vonnegut, Beckett, Woody Allen, Kafka).
I travel to Rome, to Florence, to Paris and Taize, to Jerusalem. Somewhere else, a long stay in a jail cell. I am free. Someone else is - was - not.

It's regretful that so many stories that could be told are not told. We don't read or hear about the countless stories of brutality that brave men and women have survived. We don't read about the thousands killed by natural disaster in China; of the German solders killed defending what they thought were their interests. But we do hear about Natalee Holloway, and the sister case that reached its conclusion today in the city I'm visiting on business.

Quoth the same:
When an attractive young woman from a privileged British family is murdered in Italy, you've got a popular crime story. When the person suspected of killing her is an attractive young woman from a privileged American family, you have tabloid gold. When the prosecutor hypothesizes that the victim was slaughtered during a satanic ritual orgy, you've got the crime story of a decade. When a sitting U.S. senator declares that the case "raises serious questions about the Italian justice system" and asks if "anti-Americanism" is to blame, and when 11 Italian lawmakers in Silvio Berlusconi's coalition request a probe of the prosecutor's office — well, at that point, you have an international crisis.
We don't need this example to understand the media's bias, though. We don't need it for anything except our own fascination (I didn't know that much about this until reading the article linked above, but I got sucked into an online argument about the evidence yesterday. I'm guilty as anyone else.)

But what I'm trying to remember - trying to maintain focus on - is that something like this could have happened to me. I remember the death of my grandfather when I was 10 or so, and how my tears were in private, in secret. I also remember not crying - feeling overwhelming "control" - upon learning the news, and how guilty I felt that I couldn't or wasn't displaying my grief like others. I'm still learning how to do that. I remember various dumb decisions I made when abroad, such as getting deliberately lost in a french wood surrounded by a fence during a rainstorm (a twisted ankle would have been more than problematic), and my solo sojourns in countries where I spoke little-to-nothing of the native tongue. Curiously, I have never returned to Spain, though Spanish is the second language I know best.

All of this to say that the world is strange sometimes - cruel even - I'm lucky to have enjoyed what I have, and to have had all of the wonderful experiences over my past 4 years that I enjoyed. I hope we can leave others involved in this case alone (I haven't mentioned names here deliberately), and that there can be some lesson learned from sorrows so that we can avoid repeating them or their cousins ourselves.

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