Disaster Ghouls?

I'm watching a 20/20 episode on television. They have put together a show on the murders of the cameraman and reporter in Roanoke, VA.

My husband walked in a started a diatribe when he saw what I was watching. He sees shows like these as ghoulish, as trying to "make a buck from someone's grief." He mocked the dramatic language, saying they were "wallowing" in the grisly details of the crime.

I was silent. We just don't agree on shows like these. Obviously there's a market for recaps like this. People watch. And they aren't necessarily ghouls for watching. I know because I'm one of the people watching, and I'm not a ghoul. And I'm not really wallowing, in that I'm not immersing myself in the murders for pleasure.

These shows remind me of the way my family and community used to discuss the small disasters and problems that occurred to people we knew. We'd talk about what happened, why it happened, how other people had reacted to it, and what needed to happen in the future to deal with the problem and its aftermath. It wasn't a ghoulish impulse. It was sort of a consensus-building exercise, as we tried to construct a common, shared narrative about the event. We tried to understand it in order to deal with it, and to prevent the problem from happening in the future, or if it wasn't a preventable occurrence, like illness or a natural disaster, then ways to more effectively deal with the problem in the future.

These discussions were comforting somehow. We were pulling together in a way, yet pulling back at the same time. We tried to examine an event from a safe distance, with some perspective. We were trying to get some control over the uncontrollable. I see that as a healthy reaction, Humans are social animals, and we draw comfort from banding together to deal with problems.

Now it's harder to have conversations like that. Unless you live near family, you don't regularly get together and talk. There's still some water-cooler conversation of course, but it's more superficial. So shows like this serve the purpose instead. They seek out the various perspectives from everyone involved. They try to discover why the tragedy occurred. They try to point a way forward--how can gun violence at the workplace be reduced? When should we become concerned about a "crazy" co-worker?

Maybe it isn't the best way to do it. Maybe it's not very "tasteful." But it's human. And I'm human for watching.