Housatonic — If I didn’t know better, I might’ve believed I’d picked up a copy of the London Daily Sun tabloid best known for its lurid journalistic style and its shameless exploitation of readers’ base needs for sensation and instant gratification. Without any fact-checking at all, the Sun routinely publishes first and asks questions later.
Perhaps the Sun’s most noticeable accomplishment is coming up with a seemingly endless parade of beautiful women who become the Sun’s sexy Page 3 Girls and gain instant celebrity, or more likely, self-promoting notoriety.
Nature had it right when it figured the old should die before the young. That’s the order of things, and when that order is derailed, people seem to react in two different ways: incredible sorrow and disbelief, or morbid curiosity about the most gruesome and titillating details of what might have come about. The reality is most of them are false. Worse, perhaps, are those lathering a tiny tatter of truth laced with hair-raising details with a little pinch of the purulent served on the side.
A fine young gentleman from Housatonic, Garrett Norton, 21, died tragically in an automobile accident. By the next morning, insensitive gossips arrived at any of the village’s gathering spots each bearing his/her own cobbled up version of the accident.
As wrong as this nattering may seem, it must be hardwired into our psyche since the gabbing goes on, has gone on for a lot longer than you and I remember. Look at what passes for national news on network television. A celebrity’s stubbing his or her toe or the story of the beached dolphin takes precedence over the vicious war inflaming the whole Middle East or the plight of the hundreds of thousands of displaced people who are left very much alone.
Worse still is the coverage of the accident by the local newspaper. OK, report the accident. But the aftermath of the wreck, the broken bones, the open liquor containers, the graphic description of each victim’s position in the car is in no way newsworthy and simply stokes our need to imagine the terror and the suffering and what the victims may have been thinking in the millisecond before their lives were changed forever.
Most difficult for me, though, and I hope for all of you, are the gratuitous pictures published under the guise of being part of a news story.
I can’t even imagine why a newspaper would publish on its front page the back end of a green Subaru Forrester, its battered front end covered with a sloppy blue tarp. What purpose did this serve? I suppose, for those who need it, just imagining what damage was hidden by the tarp satisfied the most voyeuristic of human tendencies.
This week’s paper, by my lights, falls into the fiery circle of Dante’s vision of hell.
A three-column photo on the front page shows a dozen or so of Garrett’s friends and pallbearers leaving the church. If the reader didn’t know the back-story, he or she would be hard put to even see the casket young men are so solemnly and sadly bearing to its final resting place. But just in case you missed it in the picture, the caption tells us the coffin is in there some place, and Garrett Norton is in it.
I don’t know anything about each of your beliefs in heaven, hell, or spirituality. But for me, Garrett isn’t in the coffin. He, with his infectious smile and boundless good humor, lives in the minds of his parents, his brother, his extended family, and his many friends.
Garrett’s friends, following a local tradition, painted a message of love and loss on the hill in front of the high school. Sun will bleach and rain will gradually wash the tribute away.
All of us should let the story and its gruesome details slip away, and remember Garrett, not as something in a box, but as he was: a hard worker, good brother and son, an easy-going friend, and one helluva a nice guy.
