The immediacy and constancy of 24 hour news carries an inevitable and negative consequence that at times triggers within me, a deep uneasiness about contemporary obsession with 'as it happens' news. The past few days the story of the disappearance of a mother, and her son with severe learning and other complex difficulties, has been told in a series of slow release revelations. Now we know that both are dead, at least one suspected murdered, and two men are being questioned, one the partner of the dead woman. Speculation is inevitable when such a story is ongoing and the facts still only selectively known; but along with that natural speculative searching around in our minds for explanations, hoping that tragic as any such explanation must now inevitably be, we hope against hope that when the story is told it will not confirm and realise our worst fears.
It is that agonising tension between our need to know and our not wanting to know the worst, that exposes both our human compassion and our human curiosity - and how a voracious curiosity can displace that essential human response to other people's tragedy - compassionate reserve. I mean by that phrase, enough imagination to guage that the scale of suffering and loss is incalculable and calls forth a communal human sorrow for others, but with a built in limiter that recognises a person's murder, and the surrounding fear and loss to others, are not mere stories for public consumption or private rumination. In one of her characteristic touches of genuine psychological insight P D James has Inspector Adam Dalgleish reflect that a person's death is an act of such final intimate privacy there is something dehumanising even in investigating to discover the perpetrator. But such investigation serves the process of justice, not the appetite for violating the privacy of the corpse, which retains the right to that respect and dignity afforded that which we with determined moral wilfulness, call human.
The inescapability of stories told through the all pervasive, ever present news, delivered with metronomic regularity hour by hour, exposes I think both the profound ethical and disquieting human questions raised by our belief in the sovereign priority of the news story. However this story turns out, a mother and son are dead, people close to them are being questioned by police, and we are all the poorer for such things happening in communities not much different from our own.
Lord have mercy
Christ have mercy
Lord have mercy
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