The Dangers of Watching TV

SYRACUSE, N.Y. A six-year-old boy may have been trying to imitate wrestling moves when he hanged himself from a doorknob.

This is a real AP story, as recounted on a Tennessee TV station's website. WTVF Newschannel 5 calls itself a News And Information Leader. Yet they somehow didn't stop to think about this first sentence of the re-posted article. Exactly which freaking wrestling moves involve a belt and doorknob?

As much as I love those kinds of promos for evening news that are the TV equivalent of a 10 second terrorist act ("Could breathing air be killing your kids? More at 11"), this kind of journalism ("Could muscular men pretending to fight each other kill your kids? More at 11") is nothing more than mentally stunted and lazy. Sure, kids watch TV and play out what they watch, but, you know, accidents happen. This strange need not just to find a reason or cause for a death, but to be able to apportion blame and then to attack the fingered cause or reason is becoming a pandemic in US society. It's so unnecessary, ultimately unsatisfying, and never really solves anything, other than some small-minded desire for vengeance or some twisted concept of justice.

Take another story here in New York. After one, maybe more incidents where kids have been killed or injured playing baseball, New York City Councillors are being asked to legislate against aluminum baseball bats being used for sports in NYC public schools. That's right, because, you know life is dangerous, and sport is part of life, so obviously, when someone gets hurt playing a sport that uses equipment, and that piece of equipment doesn't actually cause the damage, we need to create and enforce a whole set of new laws in order to protect our children from these scary devices. Let's just get this straight, kids aren't being killed by getting hit with the bat, they're getting killed by getting hit with the ball.

So, of course, we outlaw the bat, despite there being no evidence whatsover that these metal bats are any more dangerous than wooden bats, other than being able to hit a ball harder and faster, but unlike, say, a bullet from a gun, this effect of being hit by a ball flying off an aluminum bat isn't constant. It might kill you, it might just leave a bruise. If one is to outlaw a particular tool, for any reason, one needs to prove a consistent causality. A bullet to the head consistently kills or maims, a baseball doesn't.

Ergo, thus and therefore: Aluminum bats aren't dangerous, but being in the ball's way can be. Even with a wooden bat, if you get hit full-force in the temple or the solar-plexus, you may die. Accidents happen. We don't need to blame or outlaw anything. We need to come to terms with it as a fact of life.