December 15, 2012

• Words, words, words.

  Though I have no words that are sufficient to the horror and evil of yesterday’s events, I will be called upon to find some tomorrow.

  Some of us are in professions that demand of us some sort of speech in the face of personal, regional, or national tragedy.  Ministers, journalists, and mental health professionals do not have the luxury of silence in the face of any devastation sensational enough to get itself considered newsworthy.  Parents–who are in a sense pastor, newscaster, and therapist (among other things) to their children–also do not have that luxury, unless their children are small enough to call for concealment of such news.

  It strikes me that this vocational burden, this professional responsibility to compose speech in times of crisis, is usually borne by people who have no training in grief counseling, no ability to evaluate the long-term and wide-ranging effects of their speech, no concept of virtue ethics, no idea how to discipline their tongue to any larger good than expressing their own feelings or eliciting positive feelings in others.

  I am especially struck, today, by how ill-prepared journalists are to deal with their singular vocational burden.  It takes an immense amount of wisdom, insight, and moral stamina to be a journalist in such a time as this.  Alas, there are too many news outlets competing for attention, too much space or time to fill with content, too many personnel required for standards to be as high as the gravity of the profession demands.

  It must be possible for journalists to cover this and other “newsworthy” tragedies in a respectful and responsible way, but even news outlets that would pride themselves on their professionalism and high moral standards seem ill-prepared to deal with the enormity of the task before them.

  What would it take, for example, to speak in a way that expresses and respects the vastness of the evil that was done yesterday without simultaneously sensationalizing it?  Is there a way to express our horror and grief without feeding the admiration of those who are disturbed enough to enjoy such events? 

  I have heard many words last night and this morning that have missed the mark.  There is simply no call to throw around words like “carnage,” “bloodbath,” and “massacre,” even in the service of expressing the depths of our instinctual rejection of the evil wrought, even in the service of accurately depicting the nature of those events.  These are words that inject something of the bacchanal into our liturgy of national mourning; they invite us to revel in our horror and thus worship, to some extent, those who would bring such horrors about.

  Is there a way for us to call journalists–and other professional interpreters of such events–to greater responsibility, discretion, or wisdom in these matters?

  I have taken to changing the channel (metaphorically speaking–I don’t actually own a TV) whenever such language is being used.  I delete condolences emails and silly memes, I turn off the radio station or skip the podcast, I tune out sermons or lectures, whenever the speaker/writer/sender begins to indulge his taste for the sensational.  These actions are not born of a desire to avoid reality, to shut my eyes to the suffering of others, to dismiss or trivialize the enormity of the events, or to decline responsibility for the political climate in which such events are given birth.  They are a small (and perhaps useless) refusal to participate in the spectacle–the deliberate indulgence of a voyeur’s pleasure in the gruesome.

  There is a sense in which the use of these words is not vicious but merely selfish.  Those of us who are called to speak in such times are often, ourselves, still in the middle of processing our own outrage, horror, fear for our own children, crises of faith, or memories of past horrors.

  Working at a church immediately after the 9/11 attack, I had the chance to see how those who were called upon to mentor others through their grief often did so while drowning in their own.  I remember one volunteer in particular who was so overwhelmed by her own shock and horror, and so extraverted that she could not handle her emotions without speaking them aloud, that she exacerbated, rather than alleviated, the psychological wounds of the very youth she was to be helping.  Her inability to be silent, to exercise judgment in the emotions she shared, to discipline her words to the needs of others–this was understandable, given the extremity of the events.

  But it seems worth calling attention to precisely as a failure–and one that those who are not volunteers, those who already have standards of professionalism and vocational responsibility, should learn from.

  Those of us who are called to make meaning of the senseless, to speak when events would render any sensible person speechless, would do well to attend to our own horror in such times–and I intend both senses of “attend to.”

  We should seek counselors and therapists and wise friends to talk to in such times, friends who can help us process our own emotions.  Those who help others with their grief must, must find resources to help themselves with their own.

  But we should also turn a critical gaze on our own horror–we should be aware of it so that we may judge its effects, welcome and destructive, on others.  We should avoid processing (not expressing, but processing) our own grief in the presence of those who need us to speak the words that bring life.  We should avoid indulging our need to feel helpful at the expense of actually being helpful.  We should have an eye on the long-term and wide-ranging effects of our words and temper them accordingly.

  Today, I’m grinding my teeth in frustration at some of those who are speaking in the aftermath of this tragedy.  But my frustration is tinged with worry about what I will be called upon to say, myself.  Tomorrow, I will be thinking of all my friends who are pastors and praying that the words we offer will be holy and acceptable.

  • 11:44 am
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