The Curse of the Spectating Class - David Loftus

As I write this -- the morning of Friday, June 11 -- a little boy has been missing in the Portland, Oregon area for seven days. Not an unusual occurrence, sad to say, and it’s not surprising that Kyron Horman’s disappearance has dominated the local news for the past week. What is unusual is that the seven-year-old second grader disappeared without a trace from inside his elementary school on a crowded public day, and the story has made the national news.

The sweet, shy little boy, whose stepmother brought him to Skyline Elementary on the morning of Friday, June 4 with a display about red-eyed tree frogs he made for the school’s science fair, was last seen at 9 a.m. when she dropped him off. When he did not come home on the school bus at 4 p.m., she called the school.

Portland Police were notified shortly thereafter. By 9:45 p.m., about 20 searchers were combing the area around the school (located in a rural, forested area in the hills just west of downtown Portland). More than 100 volunteers were searching the next day, and the FBI was called in toward the end of the second day. Eventually, Facebook pages and new Web sites buzzed with breaking news and proposals to help, the local sheriff was being interviewed by Matt Lauer on the “Today” show, and I saw the story linked from the news feed on my Earthlink account by the middle of this week.

I won’t rehearse the many other details, which you may Google yourself. I don’t have any particular connection to the case: I have no children, and I don’t know any of the principals -- although I do know where Skyline Elementary is (about 2 miles west of where I sit typing this) because I performed there with my English morris folk dance team one sunny May Day morning more than a decade ago.

What inspires me to comment is some of the local reaction to the developing story, as embodied in the comments to each new story on the local paper’s Web site. You are probably familiar with the abusive, name-calling, overly personal and inflammatory comments that follow many news reports on almost any American newspaper’s Web site. They typically turn a local news story into an illustration of some political, ideological point, or make something personal about every national news story and any other comments made about it.

This is the sort of thing we Internet surfers used to see only on Usenet (in the mid 1990s) and then on various fan blogs (after the turn of the millennium). Now it has spread to more public forums, where it naturally shocks newcomers and the general public (not to mention established writers who have not been longtime Web surfers).

Leonard Pitts, the estimable columnist for the Miami Herald, published a piece on March 31 about how anonymity protects posters and probably encourages them to be disrespectful and abusive. His column ran in our paper that same day. Comments in my local paper immediately proceeded to prove his point. Pitts is an excellent, thoughtful writer, but conservative readers in Portland manage to find something “racist” (Pitts is African-American) about nearly every one of his pieces. (Having hunted down the column in Pitts’s home paper, I note that the general quality of comments in response to the piece there is not as bad as it was here -- perhaps because Pitts is local and readers are used to seeing him as a real person and a “neighbor.”)

In the case of little Kyron Horman, some comments immediately guessed at the possible guilty party. They accused the stepmother of kidnapping her own son, wondered whether his birth mom (divorced from father and living down state) might be to blame, suggested the stepmother’s 16-year-old son from a previous marriage might have done something sinister (he was actually on a Boy Scout camping trip with his father that weekend), blamed the school for not having security cameras operating all over the building, demanded other policies and practices on the part of the school district, and so on.

As the days have passed and the story plays out, strangers have found fault with various parents’ behavior (why aren’t they out searching night and day? … why have they not made more public comment? … why did the stepmother blithely report on her Facebook page that she was going to the club to work out that night? … etc.).

Clearly, it is a matter for suspicion that the boy disappeared from a public but fairly closed facility, which suggests he left with someone he trusts. Each day that passes and he is not found fallen in a hole, trapped in a custodial closet, or maimed or electrocuted, increases the likelihood he was indeed abducted, and by someone he knew.

But why can’t people restrain the urge to toss out hurtful theories and lay blame in public when a family is suffering over the disappearance of their beloved child? Citizens who have no connection to the case are treating it as if it were an episode of “Law and Order” or “Without a Trace” (a widely circulated photo taken of the boy the morning of his disappearance unfortunately shows him wearing a “CSI” tee shirt!); in other words, it’s just another piece of entertainment for them.

Too many Americans treat almost everything, even their own lives, as if it were a show. This reaches its deplorable zenith with the war(s), wherein citizens both thrill to and jeer news reports of complicated and deadly developments as if they were no more than points scored in an athletic contest (and a badly umpired one, too), and then lose interest and stop caring what their government does, largely because the “show” has become repetitive and boring. (Meanwhile hundreds of young American boys and girls, and thousands of Iraqi and Afghan civilians, continue to die and suffer loss of health and limbs for no damn good reason!)


This is not a game show. It is not an entertainment. It is reality -- yours and those of other human beings who happen to be caught at a particularly vulnerable time of their lives. They are not actors or politicians accustomed to being questioned, judged, evaluated, pilloried, or even just noticed in public, by the media, in front of their neighbors. So stop treating them like fictional characters, and quit behaving like this is a piece of entertainment. Learn to reserve judgment; wait for better information; keep your nose out of matters that don't personally concern you and your loved ones.


Otherwise you're just indulging in public gossip and bullying.