MoTown and Violence

As I admitted at the beginning of the last class, I am from the Detroit metro area; as an interesting fact, the population in Detroit is too low now to be categorized as a major city, so everyone lives in the suburbs. The reason the population is so low is because in the sixties a race riot began that never quite ended; on Devil's Night still, to this day, buildings all over the city are set on fire for no reason other than to wreak havoc. So I wasn't surprised at the time the fight broke out at the Palace of Auburn Hills; that's what Detroiters do!

With the exception of the Redwings, our sports teams in Detroit are generally not top-notch. Watching the Redwings (and other hockey teams) play tells us a lot about what our culture is into. Or watching football. And basketball isn't supposed to be a high-contact sport, but in Detroit it can be! For some reason, maybe it's our wealth, maybe it's our size and the fact we're so diverse, maybe it's our ego, we're just a really violent country.

My parents were sent over to Italy for work when I was a freshman, and they stayed there for two years. In Italy neighbors talked to each other, did things together. Here, we like fences and we don't talk to our neighbors. When my parents returned to the United States this past summer my dad remarked that it's really difficult dealing with the violence we're constantly surrounded with. We advertise it like we're proud of it. In Italy the movies were more sexually explicit, but they were not violent. News was international; here we like to hear about the psycho in the next county who murdered their trouble girlfriend in a fight over who got to keep the cat. After they came back I paid more attention to the violence I'm exposed to every day; it's unreal. But I'm used to it, though I wish I wasn't.

After all that, I think that we're faced with a real problem: in our country we want to earn money, and violence sells, in almost any form you can package it in. But it's killing us, it really is. How do we reconcile freedom of speech with destructive and inappropriate news coverage?