“Brook, come downstairs, there’s something you should see.”
The sound of my girlfriend’s voice pulled me out of my morning daze.
Where
had I heard that tone before? Deja vu, I thought as I stumbled down the
stairs…
just in time to see video footage of the Columbia space shuttle
bursting
into a thousand fiery bits. I sat there, amazed, as a television news
anchor came on and let millions of viewers know that yes, for the first
time since Challenger, a NASA space shuttle has exploded; no, there
were
no survivors.
I made a joke or two. Had to. Don’t know how else to deal with this
sort
of thing. It’s funny — millions of people all over the world die every
year, but when seven lose their lives in the Earth’s outer atmosphere,
or
3,000 tumble to their deaths in the wreckage of an American skyscraper,
it’s an event I can invest my emotions in.
I make a wry smile as the NASA spokesman asks the media to respect the
families of the astronauts and not interview them. I bet television
crews
are already on their way. I wonder what I would do if I was a reporter
in
Texas today. What part of the story would I be covering? Would it be
right? Would it help people sympathize with a tragedy? Dunno.
And then I realize my deja vu — it was the morning of Sept. 11, 2001,
when I
woke up to the sound of a news broadcast of the toppling World Trade
Center. No, wait, it
was the morning of May 21 a few years back, when my journalism class at
Springfield High School was interrupted by our principal’s
announcement:
Our Spanish teacher Faith Kinkel had been shot and killed by her son,
along with several students at neighboring Thurston High School.
No matter what the event is, there’s a story to be told. And maybe in
the
process, a few million starving children in Africa and Asia get
overlooked, because they href=”http://www.satirewire.com/briefs/well.shtml” target=”_blank”>picked the wrong
time
to fall in the well. I don’t know what all those journalists in
Africa
and Asia are doing. But I know I’ll keep up with this whole writing
thing
— so the next time a tragedy happens in America, I can be one of the
first
on the scene, helping these stupid Americans identify with a
catastrophe
just because of the compelling story and the well-written prose.
And maybe by then I’ll actually care myself.