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Being the Bearer of Bad News
By Gary Baum
A few years ago, on a trip through his childhood neighborhood in Chicago, my father told me the story of how he heard the news of President Kennedy's assassination. It had been the middle of lunch on November 22nd, 1963, when one of my father's fourth-grade classmates came out of the three-story apartment building that he lived in, which was located adjacent to the school. The boy carried a hand-written sign reading: PRESIDENT KENNEDY HAS BEEN SHOT. My father and his friends looked at each other across the schoolyard in astonishment as the fatal news sunk in. The boy, an averaged-sized kid with short, curly hair by the name of Harvey Burns, instantly received much attention from his peers. They wanted to know the who, what, when, where, why, and how of what happened. And Harvey was happy to oblige. This was because he had immersed himself in a guilty pleasure of our information age: being the bearer of bad news.
Now, Harvey was not a bad guy. He was smart and well-liked, and was not the kind of fourth-grader who would normally be accused of bloodlust. However, he had a tender, sickening spot in his heart for watching people receive bad news. Harvey's Freudian subconscious liked to see the reactions of disgust that accompanied the gruesome information. And it has become increasingly apparent to me that, sadly, so do we.
Last July, shortly after the JFK Jr. airplane crash, Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich penned a piece concerning the public grieving process that she had witnessed in the hours and days after the national treasure met his death off of Martha's Vineyard. Schmich detailed how she had observed strangers bearing the bad news of the crash in public places such as bars and restaurants. She detailed one case where a man received a call on his cell phone concerning the crash and quickly announced to an entire room full of people whom he did not know that the George editor had died. Some might say that the man was just doing what he felt was right: informing people of major news. But Schmich reasoned otherwise.
She felt that the man's action was a natural impulse; that the man, like Harvey Burns, felt not only a need, but comfort, in becoming a messenger of the morbid to people that he did not even know.
President Kennedy and his son's deaths are just two examples of this phenomenon. Worldwide, tragedies such as the death of Princess Diana and the Egypt Air crash meet with large-scale international grieving processes that are furthered by the press, who use clips of flower memorials and crying adults as a boost to increase ratings. The old adage that people like to be miserable together is certainly true. The press' continuing tactic of creating Grief Television, rather than reporting the facts, has lead to a society in which people are more interested in being swept up in the sadness of it all than knowing the truth.
High school, I have found, is the perfect microcosm for society's fascination with this morbid phenomenon. Like their adult counterparts, each teenager has his or her own values system. However, in the face of a tragedy, a communal sentiment of sharing grief emerges.
On Friday, October 22, 1998, I heard the news of a tragic car accident involving two seniors at my school. I, along with the rest of my fellow students, was horrified. It is truly fascinating to watch 1600 teenagers, who have trained themselves to completely control their emotions, react to the possibility of losing people they all know.
I was in Mrs. Kaelin's room, getting extra help in preparation for a Math Analysis test the next Monday, when I heard the news of the crash. Soon afterward, I decided to follow the swarm of people who were making their way toward the football field to find out just what was going on. A few minutes later I was looking out over the field from a spot against a rail on the second-floor staircase of the main building. Dozens of other students piled around me, all wondering what was happening and craning their necks for a better look. As the noises of ambulances, fire engines, police sirens, and helicopter propellers created a backdrop of complete havoc, the rumors began to emerge. Names of possible victims and hypothesizes of what may have happened to them were thrown through the air like the streamers in the gym at the fall sports pep rally only half an hour beforehand. One sophomore girl told her friend that the combination of stretchers, slow movement, and the ABC News helicopter buzzing overhead were signs of the worst possibility regarding the victims' fate. Her friend disagreed. Wild assumptions of life and death were passed through the staircase crowd with lightening speed, none of them true.
Amid the rampant rumor, one senior jogged toward the staircase crowd from the faculty parking lot. Upon seeing the dozens of anxious, information-quenched faces piled onto the stairs, he let us all know that he knew what had happened. Our interest was easily piqued and a few people asked the senior for details. He happily obliged with facts that, as the truth of the tragedy came to light later in the day, were accurate.
Within seconds, the senior became a Paul Revere of sorts, bearing the bad news. He watched as our faces grew painful with the news that he gave us and then moved on to a new group of students. Those who he had told in turn told others. And it spread. These students, nurtured by Grief Television and a media obsessed with sharing sadness for profit, simply could not help but become givers and receivers of information, morbid messengers who felt the need to share their common anguish with others. They, like almost any adult in a similar situation, turned into Harvey Burns.
Copyright © 2000 Gary Baum All Rights Reserved
Gary Baum is sixteen-years-old and currently attends Calabasas High School in Southern California. He writes a weekly manifesto http://www.aphrodigitaliac.com/mm on media, politics, and culture on the Internet and is currently the Editor-In-Chief of his high school newspaper, the Calabasas Courier.