Halloween, Ghouls and Life
by Mr.e

So, the frenzied hoards of trick-or-treaters have left the pumpkins on your front steps rocking gently in their wake and the trampled candy stampede victims have been scraped off the driveway. You’ve even managed to get the egg washed off of your car, if you noticed it in time. After a hectic shift at the front door, you clutched the candy bowl, plunked yourself down, and turned on the television set to unwind.

Watching the news is not exactly the way to achieve that state of mind. Comfortable and cozy in your favorite chair or on the couch, you are witness to the parade of real life horror stories that make the annual Halloween ritual pale in comparison.

Yet many of us are drawn to these types of stories and accompanying images – like flies to that bright blue light– held there by morbid curiosity.

The more terrible and horrifying the elements of a late breaking story, the more viewers tune in. In some aspects the news is like Halloween, a continuous procession of the morbid, fearful characters and terrifying events with occasional glimpses of innocent sweetness of a feel good story. You only remember the best costumes and goriest get-ups.

The sight of Canadian CART driver Greg Moore's car slamming into a concrete retaining wall recently etched into the collective memory; spellbound audiences treated to play by play and endless reruns of the untimely death of this promising young driver.

This story hit very close to home for me. I met this individual on more than one occasion and attended a number of the races he competed in. However, I’m still stung by the news and the inescapable fact. It’s emotional for me.

Thanks to the media millions of viewers now know who Stuart Payne was, even if they’d never heard of this professional golfer before. The stories of the mystery flight and subsequent crash made the headlines everywhere. Sadly very little was said about the others who also perished in that tragic crash. All the focus firmly fixed on the celebrity death, the other fatalities given the same importance as so much twisted wreckage.

It is when we are face to face with these disaster/horror stories that I can’t help feeling that we may be disaster vultures. While the media tries hard to keep it’s physical presence at such scenes out of the picture, viewers would be shocked to see the assembled media machine – drawn to yet another fresh corpse – if the cameras were turned the other way.

Perhaps we’re becoming more adept at tuning out the real horrors that accompany human tragedy. I can’t help but feel that these types of stories, while appalling and macabre tend to anaesthetize us and dull our reactions to much of the human tragedy that is reported in the media.

I find it embarrassing that the rubberneck syndrome will never be expunged from our social interactions.