Tag Archives: USA Today

The Glamorization of “The Other”

I was recently chosen for the second round of competition for the USA Today College Correspondent Program. Part of my task for the next stage was to compose a short piece on something in the news in the past week from the perspective of a college student. Enjoy!

            It’s hard to believe that we are the same age, that someone of only 19 years of age could be capable of such horrific acts, of killing somebody’s son or daughter. It’s hard to believe that less than a week ago, our country fell victim to yet another coward looking to garner his fifteen minutes of fame.

            I was only eight years old when my picture perfect world turned upside. I was at an age where the harsh realities of society were still far outside the perimeter of the playground, but on that one fateful day in September the floodgates came crashing open. The visions of terrorists flashed in front of me on the TV screen, plastered on the front pages of newspapers, and in every corner of my life and forever embedded themselves into my mind. It is the first real tragedy I can remember, and I never did quite understand why these faces were everywhere I turned. My eight-year-old self wondered where the photographs of our heroes and the victims were.

            We live in a media obsessed society captivated with the visualization of the other. We play looped videos for hours on major news channels of mug shots of potential suspects to invoke emotion from our citizens. We are infatuated with pointing fingers and finding a scapegoat, and we put ourselves at an arm’s length distance to the culprit, similar to the barrier that media creates between the home front and the not so distant battlefront. These mediums have the ability to make horrific events seem distant from their audiences and make it easy for Americans to compartmentalize their fear, by simply allowing them to think that they, as an individual, have nothing to do with these horrific atrocities, yet we do.

            As a technology-obsessed community we are fighting a shape shifting battle against terrorism, whether we like it or not. The communication and spread of ideas has allowed us to glamorize the other in a rapid, global, unprecedented way. We give them the satisfaction of being scared by voicing our thoughts and opinions on social media, by hash tagging #tsarnaev and following fake police scanner twitter accounts.  We are so entranced by the idea of “someone else” doing wrong, that we in turn glorify the criminals and forget about the victims. How come in times of conflict we can identify the perpetrators yet struggle to name even a single person who was shot and killed?

            As the largest users of social media, our generation needs to stand up, not only to terrorism, but also to the media movement that is redefining our nation. Instead of retweeting the names of the cowards who bomb our marathons and shoot up our schools, we need to take note of those who lost their lives in the moments of tragedy. Acts of terrorism have a way of bringing people together and way of reshaping our communities – let’s take this as an opportunity to do so. Let’s stop glamorizing the other.