The Night of the Blood Red Moon
A recurring nightmare. I wish it was a dream. It’s not. It’s as real as the moon you see here. The total lunar eclipse shown over the United States on Sunday night. The lunar eclipse shown just after midnight back east, but for the rest of us it was still Sunday. I went out from the newsroom into our parking lot here in Silicon Valley to take the picture just after 9 p.m. Was it serendipity? Was it lost on everyone else on this night of the blood-red moon.
Mass Shootings & Mass Murder
We struggled to cover them all, struggle as we do to cover the news. I don’t know that we explain to our audience, to our readers, to the public what it’s like to cover the news. I know. I see it. I see it not only from the inside but from outside as well. I work to monitor other media every working day. I was surprised on this particular night. The coverage seemed so incomplete. What a disappointment knowing we just can’t keep up with them all.
Saturday’s massacre in Buffalo, New York is a case when a story transcends all the filters we place on our coverage at my local station. Working locally, we focus on what’s going on in our immediate market. But this one ranks as an international story, not just national. The question is one of what we have become as a nation. But the story was incomplete. We needed a thread and needle to link them all. Buffalo was but one. By Sunday night the story had also become one of a church in Southern California, the violence in Wisconsin after a Bucks playoff game, and whatever happened in Houston. All deadly. All mass shootings.
There may have been more than four mass shootings on this particular weekend, the weekend with the night of the blood-red moon. I feel pretty confident I was on top of what was going on. I do that as part of my job and I think I do it well. My frustration boiled over into anger when I saw the late night news on so many outlets, the coverage I monitor so closely to make sure my news department misses nothing. Why didn’t everyone mention all the killing, all the shooting, all the death? Was it just too much; too much to keep track of; too much to consider; too overwhelming for those “covering” the news?
One of my friends, a fellow journalist I’ve known for decades, suffers from PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome suffered in a mass shooting in Los Angeles many years back. I see how it affected him. I think of all the bodies I’ve seen over my long and illustrious career, but nothing like what he saw that day when robbers came ready to do their deadly deed, armed to the teeth with automatic weapons. I wonder what my life would be like if I had been so unfortunate, unlucky enough in one of my many assignments to cover such a crime.
By now, you must be expecting some sort of conclusion here to this story. I’m afraid I don’t see any conclusion to this. There’s nothing on the horizon that shows anything I might consider as an end, a solution, an outcome. One thing I do know, one thing I am aware of, is that I’ll be covering at least two elections before the year is over. Therein lies something I can never know what to expect. I think back to November of 2016 and the shock everyone seemed to feel at the outcome. Maybe after November we’ll know, I’ll know, what we have become.