MURDER ??

I don’t know the statistics but as I watch television it seems like there are very many programs about murder. Some of them are drama programs, some are reality shows and others are on the news. The difference seems to be that in years gone by, people didn’t get away with killing others but now it seems like they do in some cases(at least on TV) .And it seems like in the cases where they have senseless mass murders the killers commit suicide and we don’t know what is behind their behavior except some kind of craziness that nobody recognized.

The very concept of one person killing another is beyond my experience or comprehension. When I delivered newspapers as a young boy ,in Alameda, Idaho one of my customers was abusing his wife, She called a man named Bob Hunter for help. Bob was the Marshall in our little town and he went out to the home, knocked on the door and was shot and killed by my newspaper subscriber. My only connection to it was that the killer happened to be one of my subscribers and as a newspaper boy I read many accounts of it in the newspaper. The killer was sent to prison for life although many people felt that he deserved the death penalty. I won’t mention his name but I will never forget it.

I have been involved in sales and social work for all my adult years. Even though I spent several years investigating spouse abuse and counseling the abusers and their victims I never personally had any contact with another murderer or a victim. Knowing what happened to Bob Hunter made me very cautious and I frequently had police officers accompany me if I thought there was going to be any danger during my visits.

As I go through the drama channels on my television I find that a very high percentage of them involve murder. They are either trying to find a perpetrator, convict one or set free someone wrongfully convicted. Even the soap operas are not free from violence. Often they lead you to think someone is guilty and at the last minute surprise you by finding someone else.

I wonder if with such a number all the murders are influencing our young people and if so how much are they influenced. We have watched on the news much about the murders at Virginia Tech, Columbine High School, Trolley Square and other places. Were the disturbed persons who committed the murders influenced by the news or by television.

I am also appalled by the popularity of movies and television shows that are advertised as horror stories. To me they are horrible stories, but apparently they are very popular particularly with certain age groups. Is the behavior of the members of those age groups influenced by the horror stories they see? Do people really like to be scared, or do they just understand in the back of their minds that this is fiction and not reality. I could never enjoy reading Edgar Allan Poe because of the darkness that I felt when reading his works. Yet in college I had to read them in order to get a passing grade in some classes. I don’t have to watch such things on TV or in the movies and if people didn’t watch them they would go away.

Personally I like to look at the bright side of life rather than a dark side. And I think our TV and movies show too much of the dark side that I don’t want to see.
I don’t really feel like I am being a hypocrite when I say I like to read mystery novels. For example I have learned a lot about the Navajo people from reading the adventures of Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn in the novels of Tony Hillerman. I have visited the Navajo reservation numerous times and even at one time employed a Navajo silversmith but I feel like I learned more from these novels than from my own experiences.

And if you ask me the quality of mystery novels is going down. I like those that teach me something but I dislike those that are obsessed with sex, blood and gore. As I look over the catalog of the mystery Guild I see that the majority of the Novels they list are written by women and have women as the main character in the story. I don’t like to think of myself as a misogynist but the reality is that I do not like most of the stories were the main characters are female. It seems to me like the stories written by women are bloodier, overall, than those written by men.

Perhaps I will give up the habit of reading mysteries and confine myself to reading history, but as everyone knows history is also full of death, murder and mayhem. Is there any answer to the problem? I don’t know. Perhaps I should give up and just go with the flow.

Dwj