Have we as a society really become so bored that we have turned into alarmists over everything? Over the weekend, in the Kansas City area, there was an incident involving four people where gunshots were fired at a shopping mall. Now I'm not trying to take anything away from the seriousness of this situation. It was a weekend crowd and the situation could have been a lot worse. Notice how I said "could have been", meaning the only people who appeared to have been hurt were the people involved. Admittedly, I'm not really clear on the details because the media is spending more time on what could have happened than what actually did.
When this happened on Saturday, I first found out about it on facebook. A friend of mine was there, working at the mall. She said she was shaken but unharmed. Of course, there were a string of replies as everybody's asking for details and wishing her well but that's about as far as it went. I watched channel 4's news broadcast that night, because they were the first one on, and was absolutely stupefied.
They had a live remote standing at the entrance to the parking lot talking about things going on inside like they were there. The mall apparently shut down early due to the incident (more on this in a minute). The broadcaster used the term "hundreds of people trying to escape" more than once(!?). Then, they close the story with a flashback to 2007 when there was a shooting in the parking lot of a different mall(?!) like that had any relevance to anything.
Sunday once again finds news crews doing a live remote at Independence Center talking to people in the parking lot. I'm not sure what kind of potentially half assed and loaded questions they were asking because I was working at the time and we had the sound down but, just the fact that they were still harping on this story and sticking a mic in peoples faces tells me that they didn't get the fear and anger they were after the first night.
I'm still curious to know how they reached the decision to close the mall early. This is not the first time people have been shot in public places and it wont be the last. There are a lot of us on this rock and we're not all going to get along. Some of us just handle it in different ways. Back in the 1980's and '90's, there was all kinds of gang related activity at the Indian Springs mall which probably explains why there's only about five stores still operating there. Well, that and the fact that everybody does their shopping online now. The point is that we didn't make a national tragedy out of it then, why are we now? Where ever you have a gathering of people, you're going to have problems of some kind. Keep your eyes open and your head down. Like they told us in the army, stay alert, stay alive. You don't have to live your life in fear, just be aware of your surroundings.
One of the other news stories, that I just finished reading about this morning, was the Italian cruise ship tipping over. The Associated Press reporter went through 4 pages comparing it to the Titanic disaster. Really?! The reporter was so busy interviewing people in the Titanic exhibit gift shop that she couldn't even say if the ship hit a reef or rocks but she felt comfortable enough in her ignorance to use the phrase "reef or rocks" more than once.
Five people died and that is unfortunate but, let's not get this out of proportion. When you're close enough to see land and can swim to it, I don't think they need to condemn the crew on how long they waited with the life boats. People were complaining about having to climb down a rope to get to the boats because of the pitch of the ship. Really?! Whatever happened to being thankful there was a boat to climb down to? I'll bet those five people would have gladly climbed down a rope and swam to a life boat.
When you're telling me that the captain ran aground, tipped over a luxury liner and abandoned ship before the some of the passengers, I'm not thinking Titanic, I'm thinking Exxon Valdez. It's a little more recent and a little more relevant. Think people spill instead of oil spill. It also makes me think of The Poseidon Adventure when you tell me a ship "tipped over". I'm sure Gene Hackman would have been there to lead people to safety but somebody hit him while he was bike riding last week. You probably didn't hear about his because he's okay, just bumped and bruised and nothing you could compare to Stephen King and make us all paranoid about commuting the local roadways.
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