I Don't Care

I Don't Care

So I'm sitting in the back row at the opera with my friend Ray and...

Hold on, wait just a minute. Before we go any further I just wanted to say how much fun it was to type those first few words! I don't suppose the context of what we were saying could be any more interesting than the fact of where we were, but let's head onward and find out, shall we?

As I was saying, I was sitting at the opera with my friend Ray...

OK, let's stop again. For your edification it was a LIGHT opera, as if that hardly makes any difference. They have those sort of things, you know. It wasn't at all the 250-pound Brunhilde warbling in German about her Viking lover being dragged away in chains to some erstwhile Valhalla. Or whatever GRAND opera is all about. This particular variant on this particular day in my hometown was a George and Ira Gershwin production from the mid '20's with lots of jazz and a silly play in between the musical numbers. It was light-hearted and quite toe-tappingly entertaining. Not at all “Der Ring des Nibelungen” or anything of that ilk. You know, ponderous and momentous.

But the light opera, as glorious as it was, wasn't what I wanted to talk about right now.

So we're sitting there, waiting for the entertainment to commence, and Ray starts recounting to me his take on one of the big stories in the news at the time. You may know the one I'm talking about. A security guard (or armed hooligan) of some sort has an altercation with a young man (or vicious criminal) and, after some sort of scuffle (or perhaps some sort of not-scuffle), a shot was fired and the young man was killed (or murdered). This discussion at the opera took place soon after the trial was over and the shooter had been found not guilty. Ray was under the impression that justice had not been served and someone had “gotten away” with murder and he continued along this path for some time.

I like Ray a lot. He's a very nice man and was smart enough to have married one of my favorite people from college, so I nodded at the appropriate places in his dialog and agreed that he had a point.

Maybe.

But I was also sure to tell him that I didn't necessarily agree or disagree with his opinion. I think he was a little disappointed that I didn't jump on the bandwagon with him and echo his suspicions that the “wrong” verdict had been reached vis-a-vis the security guard.

Truth be told I may have even been leaning in the opposite direction.

To be honest, I hadn't been following the story very closely. I'd seen it reported on the news quite a lot, of course. You couldn't turn on the television during the trial without seeing the story. But I hadn't paid too much attention to it.

Some people might gasp in shock that I would not pay attention to that particular story. Wasn't I concerned about the situation? Couldn't I immediately see that things had happened because the security guard was a bigot and had essentially laid in wait for the young man? How could I be so blind not to see this truth? Was I myself not some kind of bigot for not seeing the situation for what it was?

The answers to the above are no, no, I don't think I'm blind and no I don't think I'm a bigot.

To be brutally honest, I didn't care very much either way.

Do I hear a gasp from my faithful readers? Are you all mortified that I didn't ache for the slain young man? Are you angry with me for not vilifying the shooter and thirsting for his comeuppance? His blood?

Think about this: On the day of the incident, how many other people were shot and killed – justifiably and not, how many other people died in car wrecks, household accidents, cooking accidents, bathing accidents, lawn mowing accidents and other various ways that people seem to have discovered on how to shuffle off this mortal coil? How many people were maimed and dismembered? How many people got divorced and how many spouses died? Not to mention how many lives were lost in the myriad of wars around the world every single damn day of the year?

Do I mourn those lost lives? Do I thirst for the blood of the people who may or may not have taken them?

I don't know about you, but over my six-and-a-half decades of life I've become somewhat of a master at filtering out things, of ignoring things that do not affect me or do not interest me. It is a process that we humans all acquire or else we join the inhabitants of mental institutions. Your brain cannot assimilate all the mayhem that surrounds us. You have to pick and choose.

And I'll be damned if I'll let some television editor or some media programming director decide which particular tragedy I should be concerned with. I'm not going to rise to their bait like a befuddled trout chasing a tasty-looking mayfly with a buried hook inside.

I will choose which sad thing I will pay attention to. Or happy thing for that matter.

Again to be brutally honest, the death of my friend's dog a few weeks ago saddened and concerned me much more than the present brouhaha playing itself out on the airwaves. As to whether I feel much like demonstrating or marching for a cause, I've never really considered myself much of a Don Quixote and jousting at windmills isn't now and never will be an occupation I'm much interested in.

As I see it, an incident occurred. An investigation was performed. A person was indicted. A trial was held. A legal verdict was arrived at using the laws of that particular state. A person was found not guilty. Story over.

Story over!

Did a bad guy get away with it or did an aggrieved person gain exoneration? Was justice served or cruelly thwarted? Who am I to say. The jurors saw the whole thing presented to them, from both sides, in excruciating detail, and they said let him go. Why should my judgment, gathered from many minutes of television watching take precedence over theirs?

How foolish would that be?

I may not be happy with it or I may be. I may think the right decision was reached or I might not.

In the final analysis, what I think or what I feel are just opinions and should be taken with a grain of salt.

Because, God help me, I just didn't care very much.

As an aside, my son is a security guard. Did that color my view?

You betcha!