Mourning in America

Am I inhuman to not mourn the loss of seven human beings who merely went to work one day and ended up dead? I've been having difficulty expressing my thoughts about the space shuttle disaster a week ago, and my own detachment from what is obviously deep suffering for some. I begin with a disclaimer: it's a tragedy; how horrible for the families of the seven astronauts to see their loved ones as an exhaust trail in the sky and know they're gone. While I mourn for those seven intellectually, I don't feel a loss, for I never knew them and I never knew their cause well, except through unscientific cliches (exploration of the unknown void, the final frontier). Watching the endless newscasts on the subject I was reminded of my friend Dave who—callously I thought, at the time--told me of his reaction to September 11: "It's sad, but it doesn't affect me that much. No one I knew died. When they say ‘everything changed on September 11,’ it didn’t for me. Everything changed when my brother died a few years ago." Considering the massive outpouring of emotion for Princess Diana, John F. Kennedy Jr., and the rest, I begin to wonder about America’s mourning, what role it serves and what it prevents us from feeling.

It’s as if we institutionalize our grief, we collectivize it and present it publicly through mass media, sanctifying it through the ritual of broadcast and, yearning to feel deeply, we make it fake. We shed tears for people we never knew, people we can idealize for the values we perceive they had (although you can be certain they were regular folks with the same struggles and shortcomings as you and me), while at the same time we ignore the death of a neighbor or the truly tragic struggles of, say, the local family one paycheck away from homelessness. We burn out our compassion like booster rockets in the stratosphere of high ideals and imagined nobility, when right here, where it's gritty and real, there's real pain to take heed of.

And we seem to be taking our cues from the media. Sometimes it seems they’re not merely reporting news, but suggesting appropriate responses. When the banner headline reads "A Nation Mourns" it's perhaps more an instruction than a documentation of fact. And the instructions are pretty powerful.

Is our grief synched with a news cycle? I consider this even as I write, one week after the disaster, when the press is growing bored with the shuttle story: is there any merit in writing this column now? Will anyone care--i.e. is this newsworthy?--now that we’ve gone through our “grief” and started to forget?

The timeliness of the story was collapsed: the tears mixed with the wrenching biographies of fallen heroes and big questions of policy and politics. In a recent Los Angeles Times article, John Balzar wonders if the Columbia disaster merited all the questions the media felt duty-bound to ask: “Will President Bush have to rethink Iraq? Will he find it easier to bend Congress to his will for the sake of tax cuts? Are critics of the president once again unpatriotic? Has Bush displayed anew his remarkable leadership? Should humankind abandon the quest to explore our universe?” He offers a reality check:

Is it really shocking to learn that something as risky as entering the Earth's atmosphere from space at more than 12,000 mph results in a fatal accident? From long experience, we know that humans and fast-moving machines are a dangerous mix. Extrapolating from annual statistics, we can estimate that about 115 people die each day in the U.S. from traffic accidents--events that are shocking to survivors and families of the victims but not beyond. What is really shocking are the grandiose generalizations, the repetitive hyperbole and the sheer echo-chamber volume and mass that accompany the periodic blow-up of big news accounts these days.

He’s right. The question within hours of the Columbia explosion turned to policy: whether the shuttle program would be scrapped or at least put on hold, how it would affect the president’s budget, etc., and within hours the president was on TV in all his Type-A glory urging us to grieve and then get on with it: the space program must continue, these people didn’t die for nothing. Whatever real grief existed was being spun, and these deaths were being repurposed--instrumentalized--toward political ends.

But my lack of feeling here isn’t mine along. The Wall Street Journal’s science writer, Sharon Begley, wrote yesterday about habituation, how repeated exposure to disaster wears down not only our unquantifiable reserves of compassion but our actual neurological ability to be shocked by tragedy. She quotes Northwestern psychology professor Susan Mineka: "In the last five or ten years, we as a society have been getting increasingly accustomed to violence, and unless it reaches the proportions of 9/11, most of us do respond with less intensity than we did in the 1980s. And of course, this is all happening in the context of a probable war with Iraq." Scientifically, what happens is this:

… after an electrical impulse zipping down a neuron triggers the release of neurotransmitters often enough, subsequent electrical impulses are less likely to have that effect. Without the release of neurotransmitters, the message the neuron was carrying ("this event has just happened") comes to a screeching halt just before the synapse. It's as if the string in an old-fashioned game of telephone has been snipped. The information encoded in the electrical signal never reaches the next neuron in the circuit. As a result, downstream neurons, including those that attach emotional significance to the event, remain quiet.

Begley ends up her article with this musing: “Science can explain pretty well why America and the world have reacted as they did to the tragedy of last Saturday morning. But it can't explain whether this muted response reflects a hard-won emotional maturity -- or, instead, a hardening of the heart that speaks ill of us as human beings.” What am I saying here? I’m not sure. Maybe simply that we should take the time to grieve. To make sure we feel something first.