Casey Anthony hysteria

While athiests have been distracting themselves over whether it's okay for a man to invite a woman to his room late at night in an elevator in a hotel, the rest of the world barely noticed because CASEY ANTHONY WAS FOUND "NOT GUILTY"



Google news gives you some indication of the hysteria with the number of stories it links:

Casey Anthony Story:  all 13,399 news articles »

Space Shuttle's final launch: all 8,336 news articles »

House cancels July recess:  all 32 news articles » (to work on the deficit issue)
Karachi violence leaves 95 dead:  all 715 news articles »

Will & Kate in Canada: all 4,921 news articles »

127 people die in plane crash in The Congo: all 340 news articles »

Harold Camping moves into nursing home:  all 233 news articles » (he had a stroke a month ago)

No other news item has so many articles.  Surely something more important could have happened in the past few days, but nooooo  we love crime and punishment and it's a big scandal when things happen that violate our sense of right and wrong.

This reminds me of the Summer of 2001, when CNN was obsessed with Chandra Levy, the DC intern who went missing.  The salacious bit is that she was seeing a married senator.  CNN was salivating over the possibility that he was guilty somehow.  With no evidence of what happened to her and no body, their imaginations had to reach further and further to find some way to fill air time without actually investigating something newsworthy.

While American "news" outlets were obsessing about one missing white woman, they weren't telling Americans that fundamentalist muslims hate us so much they want to kill us randomly.  They didn't connect the dots between the embassy bombings and the U.S.S. Cole.  They didn't take G.W. Bush to task for not paying attention to international affairs.

They're doing the same thing now.  We have no idea what evil lurks in the minds of men.  This is why we have nutters promoting conspiracy theories and other nutters following those theories.  We actually were victimized by a conspiracy on 9/11/2011.  Now, almost ten years later we're not paying attention again.  The hypervigilant amongst us are looking for conspiracies and finding them under every rock because the "news" won't do it for us.

The other thing they're not covering is the tragedy of other childrens' deaths.  Where is Nancy Grace's outrage over the death of  Jeziah King or Rilya Wilson?  Why is it not national news when a black child is killed but it's the "trial of the century" (Nancy Grace's words) when a white child dies?

Nancy Grace is a white woman with white babies.  She's on TV because the majority of Americans are white and have or have been white babies.  We mourn our own.  We're not really much different from the Jews who "were permitted" to own slaves of other tribes but not of their own or the medieval crusaders who plundered the wealth of Christian Arabs because skin color and language (and greed) meant more than religion even in a "holy" war.

I'm not saying that society shouldn't care about children, or that this case shouldn't have received any coverage, only that we need some fairness and some perspective.   We have a long way to go.

Disclaimer: I was a missing person at age five for about two months.  My disappearnce never made the news, and I do think it should have.  However, I wouldn't have wanted my disappearance to be covered 24/7 to the detriment of other children or coverage of international threats.