Moon set from my window...

looking up to the flowers...

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The Terror Outside My Pancakes

Growing up I can site two clear incidents that gave me pause and defined the word Terror in a way that absorbed my imagination so completely it gave me goose bumps and eluded any landing in a familiar or safe place in my head.  Try as I might nothing seemed to be able to distract me from the pure horror behind my eyes:
1. The day John F. Kennedy was assassinated.  The world stopped. We all looked to what we trusted- the news. The live murder of Oswald, the instant justice we all felt, the comfort of revenge falling far short of quenching what we all searched for.  The Why.
2. My Thirteenth October and my mother sitting me down to explain how the world might soon be ending because of missiles and man named Castro.
It was a time when censorship had clearer lines when it came to horror and terror, when the idea of censorship, (seemed anyway) to be a responsibility. Graphic or horrific scenes were rarely shown on the television or newspapers.    
How did all that change? When did sensational usurp reasonable?  No child back then was subject a barrage of headlines rife with threats, horrors and intimidation. It is now ubiquitous among nearly all the media forms. The excuses being “we need to be accurate” “the public should know the whole truth” and of course- “ if we don’t publish it, someone else will.”
In all my collective years in law enforcement, all the live horror, the fear and the loathing, the graphic realities of man’s inhumane treatments to each other, I grew my own personal cocoon around what I saw,  what we saw as we investigated and dove into procedure to help distract. In a few years of these scenes we bragged immunity to the next horror- that was necessary to survive in an atmosphere that often times bred terror and fear and very interesting nightmares.
It was during my second fork of pancakes as I read through the “news” and the litany of horror after horror the terror after... when I thought: where is the value in this!?
Aren't we creating a scar tissue that can only distances ourselves from compassion when every day is filled with what is delivered as “normal”?  Where does a 10 year-old who constantly hears about a bomb attached to a human that blew up innocent people go? Does he or she eventually  treat it like a commercial? There is no time between these published events for perspective, no place to land near solutions when the staccato pulse of horror uses up all chances to take a breath.  
This is an abuse of the 1st amendment in my opinion- and you can site all the excuses and reasons your lawyers can find to defend yourself, but you’re defending yourself against the very people who used to trust you to be responsible Mr. Media.  In my opinion you’ve done more to undermine that document the 1st amendment is attached to than any enemy in the past 200 years.