No, it doesn't end tonight.

I ripped this from alexthegirl.com, hope she doesn't mind. I just wanted to let you all see read something i find quite interesting, gets you thinking. Yea new layout by the way.

Ten years ago, I was a 19 year old girl who had moved to New Zealand and was spending my days surfing. One afternoon, I got a call from my father who told me that my brother-in-law of eight years had just died in an accident.

I took a flight home the next day and went to my sister's house. It became my job to answer the phone and hang up - it was just the media calling, wanting details. They didn't care that we were grieving when they had an audience who wanted gory pictures.

My brother in-law was a well-known stunt man in the entertainment industry. He didn't die on a movie set; he died jumping out of a plane like he had done for ten years. The only difference was that on that day, a man decided to take his 10 year old daughter for a sky dive to celebrate her birthday. The little girl went first on a tandem dive, and waited on the ground to watch her father. He did a tandem jump with my brother in-law and then he panicked. His fear became so strong he paralysed my brother-in law's arms and prevented him from opening the chute. The fought and struggled the whole way down.

Neither of them made it.

My sister had just left to get them lunch, when she returned, she returned to her husbands crumpled body, head half gone as it was smashed into the ground. A little girl cried hysterically, screaming, "I killed my daddy." My brother in law's best friends had watched him fall to his death, helpless. None of their lives would ever be the same.
The media didn't care.

My family's tragedy of losing a wonderful, caring, kind man, who had been in our lives for ten years, became nightly entertainment for thousands of people. The suffering each one of us had to endure, the nightmare that was our lives, was gossip in the morning paper. No one stopped to think that there was families suffering the most horrible thing you could imagine because everyone was so used to seeing it on the nightly news. My family would have to deal with the media tourment on top of a death, but luckily it would only be for a little while until something just as bad happened to another family.

The day we buried my brother in-law, reporters flashed their cameras and talked trash while they waited to report it on the news. I, however, held my mum on my right side and my sister on my left, and tried to keep them up while their bodies kept giving out due to grief.

I do not watch news on television. In fact, I don't watch television at all. I don't find suffering entertainment. I don't find other people's tragedies something enjoyable. It's like going to India, Iraq, Uganda and being a tourist amongst horrific situations and snapping photo's of all those suffering and starving. You do nothing to help them because their suffering isn't yours. You don't feel sad for what you see, in fact, you don't feel anything at all. It's just tv - or a vacation - after all.

Sitcoms that are supposed to be funny are filled with wise cracks, mean jokes, stereotypes and arguments. Dramas are filled with murder and rape cases that you're supposed to follow along as you rest from a hard days work. Reality TV is the rage, watching people lie and cheat and steal from each other as we chug a beer and remember the good parts to talk about at work tomorrow.

This is our entertainment. We don't think it's bad, in fact, we're getting satellite so we can see more. We forget that the news story just covered deals with real people, that the sitcom full of anger, mean jokes, and stereotypes only perpetuates more crap in our life and that the rape drama on TV is someone's living nightmare and not just a way for us to spend an hour.

People try to eat healthy, they try to exercise so their bodies look healthy. Inspirational, self-help books are all the rage and therapy use is at an all time high. Yet none of that means one bloody thing if we continue to make people's suffering part of our daily dose of entertainment. Watching television all glossy eyes, being non-chalant, not noticing and even making a "family night" of these shows is just as bad, I believe, as if we were to stand and watch a shooting happen right in front of us and do nothing. Would you bring popcorn to the event that caused my brother in-law to die?

I wonder what would happen if people disconnected from their TV's for even just one week. If anyone could do it. If they didn't get their daily does of 5PM fear, if they didn't get their "realty TV screw over-a-thon," or the nightly murders to solve. I wonder what would happen. If people couldn't watch tragedy over and over and over again, I wonder if it would mean something when they saw it and if they would live more, have more compassion, if they would have more first hand experience rather than just vicarious violent ones via a TV. I wonder if people stopped to think about that what they see on the news is actually affecting someone somewhere, and rather than just watching it, if they could do something. I wonder what would happen if people disconnected from the TV, and instead, started connecting to life.

I wonder if it would be better. I wonder if we've gone too far to turn back.

(Note: Please do not write me about to say how sorry you are for this to have happened. The point of this post wasn't just to talk about someone dying, to gather pity, to make you feel sad because "you're supposed to." It wasn't supposed to be "another story about something tragic" that you'll forget about when you listen to the news on the way to work tomorrow morning and hear something bigger. Also, when I refer to "news" it's to American News as it's sensationalised, fear driven news that isn't actually meant to inform. (Watch BBC or CBC news and you'll understand the difference.) The post was to make you think and if you're not sure what about, then you need to think harder.)