Alia rogationis efflagitare...

We live in an age where we are nagged to critically analyze the media that we receive. We demand that we be given an accurate version of the events that happen in our world, and even then, we still attempt to decode what prism these accounts are fired through. However, we do not often enough examine what we are not told because due to our implicit implications that we do not want to know.

Tip for the ladies: If you are kidnapped and murdered by your sweetheart, a vital element to your former lover being brought to justice is that you are under 30, cute, white and (probably most important of all) not poor. Troll the local and American news, and it’s breaking news hither thither about affluent white girls in Aruba going missing or some woman in an LA suburb who was murdered by her husband/fiancée, whatever.

The reaction to these crimes always impresses me, since it shows just how mobilized a police force can be when middle and upper-class America (I’m not going to talk about Canada at all. Don’t pretend like we have a separate mass media) becomes interested in the outcome of an investigation. This attention briefly signals to us that we could all be the victim of violent crime at the hands of those who are supposed to love us. We see these violations of security and we perceive them as a very compelling problem, given the attention they receive.

A quick analysis shows that we as the relatively well-off are not in any real danger from meeting our end in this way. To think that women in middle to upper classes are at risk of being killed by their husbands/boyfriends is a farce, but not nearly as much of a farce as the heaping levels of media attention dedicated to fashioning this as a problem. In the US, roughly 3.9 women are murdered by their husband/boyfriend every day. When you consider how many days there are in a year, that’s a fairly staggering statistic. Since violent crime is disproportionately linked to poverty, I think it is safe to assume that the victims of these crimes aren’t socialites in Beverly Hills with American Express Black Cards. In fact, the rate of being killed by partners occurs almost exponentially more in households with a combined income of less than twenty-five thousand dollars than any other category. This is just murder, mind you. This category can be vastly expanded to include a million or so victims if any kind of violent crime is included, even more so if you don’t restrict the relationship to intimate partners.

The argument could be made that if violent crimes against young, attractive white women weren’t brought forward and revealed on the news, then we would have no dialogue at all about homicides committed against women. I agree to a point. If every woman murdered by her husband/boyfriend were to be reported on CNN, the news would be a far more depressing affair than it already is. However, these instances aren’t reported because news channels want to effectively point out a serious societal and cultural problem; they’re reported because we find them unusual. On the other hand, the murder of a minority woman in lower income bracket at the hands of her boyfriend/husband won’t be reported in your normal channels; it simply isn’t news.

If an investment banker comes home and kills his wife and hides the body, his crime is considered senseless: he has anything he could ask for and we expect educated professionals to be able to handle their problems without force or bloodshed. When we discover his motive, whatever it may be, we feel comfortable condemning him for committing a deviant act when he had the means to avoid doing so. Shows like CSI and the like thrive on these kinds of crimes. In the end, the show tells us that people do crazy, senseless things for reasons that we can barely comprehend and that even though it occurs in ‘our world’, the extraordinary nature of the crime renders the perpetrator and their motivations as outside of ‘our reality’. A deeper exploration of a homicide in a more common scenario would force us to face the conditions under which that crime was allowed to be committed in (weapon availability due to a lack of policy restrictions, greater levels of income inequality, etc). The deeper we look, the more likely we are to realize that we are bigger component in the machine than we thought. We find this so unacceptable that we refuse to acknowlege it. Unfortunately, the psychological reasoning behind our interest in the former scenario is directly responsible for the clear lack of interest in the latter scenario.

This disparity will continue, which is unfortunate since this cycle denies us the only real remedy to this problem; that we demand to be offered the unadulterated facts and allow us to face the ugly social, economic and even cultural truth that we must know in order to come up with long-lasting solutions.


Question:
How many people died in the 20th century? (15 points)

No Googling this one. Try and figure it out with some basic information.