What Purpose Does All This Serve?

Here is a confession: I have not watched any of the videos or the images from the explosions in Boston. Nor do I plan to. I cannot, for the life of me, figure out what purpose that would serve.
And yet, I feel that people all over the world are obsessively doing just that. Going back to those sites over and over again to watch the horror, the smoke, the blood, the screaming.
See? I can imagine it. And that is as much as I want to do. That is more than I want to do.

As I walked this morning, I took note of where the most blooming blackberries are clustered. I think this is what the human brain is wired to do. To take note of that which can be of potential importance in our own lives and to register and store it until the information is needed. This is true for potential dangers as well. The day I saw a bear track in the dirt road, the hair on the back of my neck stood up, my heart began beating faster and I suddenly became hyper-aware of my surroundings. This was understandable and it could have, if the bears around here were actual killers of humans, which they are not, been a life-saver.
This is the cave-man brain. This is the brain which has sustained the species. The brain that remembers where the fruiting bushes are, the brain which remembers where the bear crosses the path. The brain which can observe that which works and help us to adapt our behavior appropriately and to observe that which does not.

But we are so far removed from the needs which the brain evolved for. Very few of us will need to know where the berries are to ensure the survival of our family or our tribe. Very few of us will need to know where the bear crosses. But our brains, our amazing brains, still have the need to observe and note and store information and the amount of information which it encounters daily has multiplied geometrically to the point where no human brain on this earth can contain it or even receive it and so we have invented these machines which do that for us and those machines deliver even more information to the brain and quite frankly, I believe that this is part of why so many of us are constantly depressed and overwhelmed and anxious.

If we watch images of horror which happened somewhere else in this world, our cave-man brains want desperately to store and DO SOMETHING with that information. But what on earth can we actually do? I sit here in Florida and I can mourn the loss of those who died, I can grieve for those whose injuries will cause them great pain and suffering for a lifetime and for their families. But does that really serve any purpose? Will it help those who are dead? Will it help those who are suffering?

I don't think so.

And will I be any more apt to be careful in crowded places? Now there, perhaps, possibly. But what good will that do? Was there not more security at the finish line of that race than any of us can imagine? Were there not more cameras in one place than at any other place on earth at that moment?
This is the thing about random, senseless violence. Because it is random, because it is senseless (to those of us who are sane, at least) there is no way to predict it and despite all efforts, no way to entirely remove the possibility of it.

I don't think that evil, insane acts of horror are on the rise in the world. I believe that history would bear me out on this. But because we have access to every report, every video of such violence, we feel that there is the possibility for it everywhere. This is not unlike the fact that a child's abduction in a town all the way across the country makes us feel as if it had happened in our own backyard, thus causing us to restrict our children's activities in a way that will quite definitely have a negative impact on their lives. This is why I don't read the postings on Facebook about missing children. So many of them have been abducted by family members or have run away because of something horrible going on in a family that it seems to me that more purpose would be served by all of us paying attention to what is going on in our own neighborhoods and schools and families and churches. I am a living example of the fact that most sexual molestation of children occurs in the home by family members. It is almost always a known and trusted person who is the one doing the molestation and these perpetrators are so very skillful at finding the very child who is most needy for adult attention and love to groom and then molest. Of course there are the rare instances where a deranged person unknown to the community darts in and kidnaps a child but this, I believe, is not the common occurrence that we feel it might be because of the media.

We read about these things. We see the videos. Our brains register them as danger to us and to our children. But there is nothing we can do about any of it and so we are left with a lingering and persistent anxiety and fear which escalates into a sort of national paranoia and even insanity.

Look. I'm not saying that we should not be aware of what is going on in the world. Trust me- there is no way to avoid it. But what good does it do for us to obsessively watch the videos, to endlessly listen to the reports on radio or to read the Tweets about the event or to watch the TV news coverage? I think it becomes a sort of sick voyeurism after a certain point.

Maybe I'm just crazy but if I see one more repost of the picture of that precious little boy who was killed in the explosions, I think I'm going to scream. Some of the postings ask for prayers for him and his family but I don't have any religious belief that any prayer I might offer up can do one damn thing for his soul or his suffering family. Again, that's just me. But viewed in this light, what can seeing his picture do but kill a little part of my own soul?

I am still living. So are you. All we can do in the wake of such events is to continue to be one of the many, indeed the majority, of human beings who base their lives not on hate or violence but on love and compassion and caring. Seeing blood and smoke and horror does not foment those emotions in me. It only makes me feel useless and inadequate and horrified and paralyzed and that is not going to help a thing.

And so no, I am not going to watch those videos. I am not going to listen to the news obsessively where even on NPR there are people calling in with ridiculous baseless assumptions, with paranoid theories, with their fears and their anxieties and a sort of pain which quite honestly, is not theirs to feel but which has been thrust upon them by the images which have made them feel as if they were there when it happened. Yes, there is the belief that we are all related, that everyone's suffering is my own, but in reality, neither I nor anyone else can contain it all. That may have been possible when "everyone" was our tribe or our small village but our caveman brains cannot cope with the suffering and pain and horror of the entire world which is now available for us to know.

I've spent too many hours trying to say here what I wanted to say and I haven't gotten it right but more words aren't going to get that job done. Not my words, anyway.

Look- let's love each other. Let's do the best jobs we can with our own families, our own loved ones, our own lives. Let us acknowledge others' pain but let us not try to take on burdens which are not ours to take and which serve no purpose but to weigh us down in ways that prevent our ability to do the best we can for our own. And let us give some privacy to those who are actually and in real life, going through what they are going through.
Is that so crazy?
My cave-woman brain tells me it is the only way I can be. And in this instance, I am trusting it.