Writing on Tragedy

In my opinion, to write about a national or even a global tragedy such as the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11 2001, no matter the audience, one must present the facts and the facts alone. If a person does not stick to the facts, and they go and tell someone their opinion of what happened, as a fact, that person (the tellers audience) will go and present what they heard as fact to another person and the cycle will continue and essentially never end and lead to an overall ignorance about the tragedy. For example, when George Bush reported the incident and later announced the Iraqi invasion as a result of 9/11, people assumed that the country of Iraq had attacked the United States when, in fact, it was Al-Qaeda, which is a militant Islam terrorist organization centered out of Afghanistan. Also, along the same lines of deduction, people thought that all Muslims carried the same deep-rooted hatred for the United States as Al-Qaeda, when in fact the Muslim religion is a very docile, calm, and inviting religion. Al-Qaeda and organizations like it have extremist and radical views that are only shared by very few Muslims, not all Muslims.

            Audience is a factor when it comes to age and education. You most certainly will not report all the cold hard facts of a tragedy to a child; people just say “a bad guy did something bad” to a child, not “an extremist Muslim terrorist organization hijacked four planes, flew one into the Pentagon in Washington DC, one into a field in Pennsylvania, and two into the World Trade Centers in Manhattan.” However, when talking to someone of age and of an education level higher than high school you can say all of those things and more and they will understand. The uneducated person is the person you have to watch out for. If they know nothing of the subject they will most likely believe everything you say. If you told an inept human being from Appalachia that the American government planned the entire thing as a publicity stunt, they would most likely believe you and spread it to their other inept friends and eventually get to an educated person and then fights ensue and that’s not good.

            When it comes to reporting tragedy to an audience, no matter the race or social background, other than age and education, in my opinion it’s the best to sensitively report nothing but the facts and try to keep emotion out of it as much as possible. Emotion disrupts rational thinking and one cannot report accurate important information about something devastating and catastrophic when they are not thinking rationally and clouded by tons of emotion.