Karl Klockars

For both our sakes, I’m not going to spend time doing any picture researching for this post.  It will benefit both of us, as we’ll quickly see.

I’m having a hard time justifying exactly why we’re still spending valuable media minutes worrying about a dozen people getting their asses handed to them in richy-rich land, when just pixels away from that story this morning on the Tribune site is another story about a child shot in the head while protecting another child.

Makes you wonder where our (or their) priorities are.

Sometimes I have horrible thoughts enter this poor head o’ mine.  One of those thoughts this morning was “What would the reaction be if Chicago had to see all the victims of everything that’s going on?  What would the result be if Chicago woke up and had to look dead people in the face?”

I know, the eventual result would be that we’d be numbed to the vile and violent images just as much as we’re numbed to the statistics of violence in the shitty neighborhoods around town.  But it would take a while.  I hope.

Would there be any value in trying to jumpstart the populace via shock?  Since all of us have grown so used to exploding cars and gun battles and jump kicks and shit like that, would there even be any difference between seeing the reality of the situation versus the faked, fancypants Hollywood version?

I think there would.

I remember being a stupid little kid renting Traces of Death tapes with all my friends and thinking we were tough because we would watch them and laugh, laugh, laugh.  The world doesn’t bother us!  Look at these horrifying, horrible things that people do to other people!  Ho ho.

To this day, ten years on down the road, the images of that afternoon remain burnt into my head.  I daresay I might be a better person having been placed face to face with video images of man’s inhumanity to man and the things that can happen to a body in this sometimes-terrible world.  At the very least, it made me think about things a hell of a lot differently.  And I don’t laugh at it anymore, no doubt.

Probably most of us don’t want to live in a world where the news shows pictures of people shot in the middle of the street.  Of bodies lying demolished in freeways, of families slain in their living rooms.  But guess what – cops don’t want to see that stuff either.  Nor do EMTs or ER docs.  But they do, because it’s their job.  Maybe we should start considering it our job to observe the cold reality of what’s going on in our own area, and not just yearbook photos, wide shots of police lights and yellow Do Not Cross tape.

Give it a shot, Chicago news.  When something really, really terrible happens, – like, let’s say,  kids being shot in the head – show it.  Let us know what we’re going to see, let us take the option of looking away if we know we really can’t handle it, but show us.  I think a lot of people will probably look.  It’s in our “slow down and look at the car crash” kind of nature.  And maybe we’d learn something.

It might make stories of violence, pain and rage a little more accessable to people who don’t have to duck bullets every day.  It could make us consider how we treat each other in light of how fragile life is in the long run.  Perhaps it might make the results of our actions more real to one of the animals on the other side of the weapon.  Many of whom are probably also too young to understand what they’re doing when they’re pulling a trigger – and who might be surprised at what really happens when their bullets end up where they want them to.

This is contingent on everyone doing it.  Each news outlet has to play ball, otherwise us scaredycats will go running to the program that doesn’t punch us in the face with what’s actually happening in the world.  Maybe when we realize what we’re doing to each other, it’ll make it a little less easy to ignore.  Not that getting mugged is much fun, but the sight of a bullet hole in the head of a 15 year old girl might put it in perspective for all of us – the populace, and the press.