On a low-key homebody Friday night, I sat through a full episode of Dateline for the first time... well... ever. My reaction during the episode was revelatory to me leading me to write it down in this post.
Before I get to the account and clip of the hour long "news" magazine though, a, perhaps, rhetorical question: do you ever find yourself arguing at a cocktail party, or with close friends or family about the state of our nation where the universal opinion is that Americans overall are selfish, greedy, narcissistic deviants?
I like to think of myself as someone that holds the view that as individuals, human beings have better intentions; that we all want the same for ourselves and the ones we love: health, companionship, happiness and peace.
During this hour of Dateline, I started to feel otherwise, recognized the path I was following this smutty show down, and finally emerged realizing that the malignant mood of our nation can be blamed partially on shows like these.
First, though, the network's own preview of this episode:
As you can see, it was a very tragic tale of the perfect family ripped apart by premature death and destruction. Titillatingly told enough to suck me in immediately and keep me from getting up to change the channel (dead batteries in the remote, cat on my lap). The gut-wrenching sadness of the victims was followed up by the sordid details of the actions of the driver at fault - a teenage girl - and her family in the aftermath. What?: she was TEXTING her boyfriend while driving after dark at high speed? Really?: she made a spur decision to commit suicide by driving head on into another vehicle? No way!: her family sued the widower and the victim's estate for pain and suffering?! These people are parasites - they deserve my scorn!
I'll skip the details of the rest of the story of the prosecution's case, their decision to charge first degree murder, the way it impacted the respective families and small town, and so on. It's icky.
And that is what brings me to my point. My mood went down and stayed down. I felt myself morph into an angry white female ready to share my outrage with anyone that would listen that we're obviously a nation of demented, sociopath-narcissists that take take take and can't admit or apologize when we've made an egregious mistake.
Americans are deluged with crap like this on a regular basis on network and cable TV. The reality programming and other manipulated tales of true crime. The Casey Anthony tales of lesser renown told over and over. How could we not start to hate each other? How could we not blame each other for the state of our nation?
Remember when the first news magazine - 60 Minutes - used to expose corruption in big business and government? (If you're under 30, maybe you don't.) Have you ever seen clips of Walter Cronkite reporting the facts on the evening news?
Gone are the days when television provided the service of reporting on items that really should concern us. Instead we get day after day of depressing distraction that turns us against each other in the process.
Dateline ended it's hour with a preview of next week's show of another outrageous tragic tale at the hand of some evil perpetrator. I will never watch that show again. Yes, there are bad apples, but they are the anomaly - it's not the other way around.
We need to come together to fix this nation and save us from ourselves. And I invite all of us to dispense with the snark, the cynicism - even on our grumpiest days - and recognize that the eyes that gaze back at us in conversation (theoretically if on-line) are windows into a soul that is much like our own.