'Charlie Hebdo' and other bad news

This was not the view taken a few hours earlier by Marty, a bio-tech executive in my locker room aisle, but it may have influenced my seeking it. These terrorists aren’t criminals, he’d volunteered. This is war. Now the French will get the idea. And it’s about time Obama got it, too. Marty’s solution, since “we know who these guys are,” is to periodically, but regularly and without warning, bust in their doors, search where they live, seize their computers and cell phones, find out to whom they’ve been talking, and then bust in their doors, too. My immediate response had been to ask how he’d liked the A’s trade.

But about that long view.

By the numbers

Crime or war, it was three people in France last week killing 12 people because they disliked some cartoons. Over the weekend, someone (or ones) killed four people in a parked car in San Francisco, maybe because of drugs. A fellow in Idaho killed three people, seemingly because he was mad at his stepmother. An adult male suicide bomber killed seven people in Beirut. A 10-year-old female suicide bomber killed 20 people in Nigeria. ISIS killed 30 Kurds in Syria. Thirty-six people were killed in a stampede by other people in China. Fifty-six people were killed by tainted beer in Mozambique. And 57 people were killed in a bus-oil tanker crash in Pakistan.

Every day, people kill other people for many reasons, all of them crazy. Or they kill them accidentally, out of stupidity or carelessness. In all cases, the results are identical. All the victims are just as gone. And all grieving families are the same. And if it is war, they are part of one war, us against ourselves, going on forever.

A modest proposal

We are all people. We all share this planet and this trip. I do not know how to stop us from killing one another, but I have an idea about how to stop in those being terrorized the desire to bust down other people’s doors, seemingly oblivious to what they or their 10-year-olds will be predisposed to do next. Take the “If-a-tree-falls-in-a-forest-where-no-one-is-listening” approach, I say, and stop reporting carnage. No more coverage (voluntarily, of course) in any form, by any media, of anyone killing anyone else. The fearful will calm down, and it may even work out that if no one is going to know how many and how horrifically others have been offed, some of those doing the offing will lose their motivation.

Or maybe, if the news is necessary, it could be conveyed by listing daily totals of the slain, country-by-country, in tiny type without further elaboration, like ball scores from the lesser leagues. But then the danger is that national pride may assert itself, and states may seek to rise in the standings — maybe by recruiting and giving scholarships to the homicidal.

For Dan Rottenberg's thoughts on recent events, click here.