America: The Illusory Currency of Moral High Ground

A meta news story about the coverage and reaction to the news cycle...

Last week, upon hearing about Cecil the Lion's demise at the hands of an American dentist, whose infamy makes printing his name here redundant, I found myself outraged, disgusted, and other negative superlatives that congealed into a claret of disdain. I even felt compelled to write an open letter from the deceased lion to his hunter, that I hoped would both give the victim a voice and chide the trophy hunting community. However, this letter was a mere drop in an ocean of opinions and vitriol, as similar anger permeated across all channels of social media, television, and print. In hindsight, my own knee-jerk reaction to an issue that has existed for generations serves as a poignant example of how a majority of us react to packaged topical current event narratives, loosely called "the news." In fact, it is plausible that our own reaction and subsequent lack of interest in these stories shortly after, directly mirrors the news cycle. Once we all have raced to the moral high ground on an issue, amplified through expressions on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, we just as quickly race to the next issue to pass judgment.

It's an intriguing pattern of behavior, wouldn't you agree? One could argue that this has always been latent human behavior, that it is grained into our DNA and soul, to decry the "bad guy(s)" to create a cognitive distance between the negative and our own identities. Whether we are conscious of this behavior or not, there seems to be social currency in who can place the blame the loudest. Who can humble brag the best on his/her news feed. Who can point a finger the fastest. Who can assassinate a complete stranger's character the quickest. Ladies and gentlemen, the court of public opinion has never been as efficient in passing judgment and condemnation based on a headline and a grain of truth as it exists presently. To be perfectly meta, this is the news story that no one is reporting, reading, or ranting against.

It must be some kind of waking nightmare, to go to sleep anonymous only to awaken to a world where your name, likeness, and reputation are all collective substitutes for hatred and cowardice. We all must fear, at least on a subconscious level, of finding ourselves on the wrong side of the news story and public opinion. We all live in a nation founded on the principles of "due process" and "presumed innocence before the assumption of guilt," however our actions and reactions tend to resemble more a digital mob of torches and pitchforks, singularly focused on supplying the monster with vigilante comeuppance. The irony lies in how mass opinion claims such moral high ground in short order, and without considering all the facts or source of information, the mob and the monster seem almost indistinguishable.

In each of our lives there has been an event that has caused us to wonder aloud, "This might be the event that causes a tipping point," or at best, "Now we can begin to change." Take the Sandy Hook massacre as a case study. To be brief, a mentally disturbed teenage boy murdered his own mother with her legally bought and registered firearm, then drove to a nearby elementary school, where he opened fire on a classroom of kindergarten children. Not surprisingly, this story generated universal outrage and condemnation to the point where you could easily imagine a Social Darwinism sprint up Moral Mountain, each of us climbing over our brethren to be the first and loudest to place blame on the assailant, lack of gun control, or the even the existence of a thriving "gun culture" that created the availability of the weapon. It was such a hot button issue that President Obama held a press conference to express condolences and to assure the American public that he would spearhead new legislation that would prevent another massacre of this ilk. That was almost three years ago, this December, and while stricter laws were written and loopholes were closed, the public discourse regarding firearms is fairly nonexistent.

It is a fair question to ask ourselves, what is worse, the rush to judgment and laying blame, or how as quickly we react to these tragedies we shortly thereafter forget about them? For every Timothy McVeigh, there may be a Richard Jewell. For every legitimate charity, there is someone wearing rubber bracelets without offering charity. For every tragedy, there may be outrage with limited positive social change. However, to hold ourselves as moral superiors over our fellow man without separating fact from conjecture, without questioning the source of information, may leave us indistinguishable from the monsters we aim to slay.