Don't go near the riot

It's not that celebrating is bad, it's just that some people don't know how.

Sadly the triumph of a city's sports team has become an opportunity for rioting and looting for values-deprived barbarians mingling amongst us. It's happened twice in Boston in 2004, the first with the Patriots' Super Bowl victory, and now with the Red Sox historic come-from-behind win over the Yankees. Both times someone has been killed, the first when a car careened out of control, the latest a young female college student accidentally hit by a policeman's pepper spray projectile.

Boston authorities are concerned, of course, because the Sox have home field advantage in the World Series, and celebratory violence could erupt again. (See Death Raises Questions, The Associated Press) Concerned, but not enough to invoke the city's emergency ban on alcohol sales during major sporting events.

What is disturbing is that some people don't seem to understand what happened Thursday night. One young man, who was attempting to scale the back side of the Green Monster, apparently did notice that cars were being set afire. Forced to dismount, he lamented, "There was nothing violent going on. It was all celebration."

Yeah, right. Just good clean, drunker-n-a-skunk fun, with a few Boston bad-asses thrown in for good measure. Just enough property destruction and rioting among 80,000 spontaneous celebrants to require the police to take counter-measures that inadvertently led to the death of one 21-year-old innocent.

But what really flips us out (or off, perhaps) is that readers called and e-mailed to the Boston Herald and forced an apology for running a front-page photo of the dying girl lying on the ground. Looks like the Herald will be more "sensitive" from now on, and ordinary folks won't have to see anything that might actually disturb their enjoyment of the next celebration.

We saw the photo. It's sad. It's also instructive. Something seriously awful happened on the streets outside of Fenway, and the proof is on page one. It's not an abstract statistic heard over the TV or the radio, not just a rumor among the office staff. A real human being, Victoria Snelgrove, died because of the actions of a few self-centered, nihilistic malcontents. The kind of people who show up to protect the G-8 summits. The kind of people who say society is discriminatory, unfair and evil, and then go out and try to prove it. The kind of people who would rather set fire to an automobile than to get a job and purchase one.

THE BIGGER PICTURE

In the meantime the rest of us get squeamish. It brings up a very large and universally American issue for today. We can't abide looking at a photo of a tragedy -- it might prick our conscience and force us to become involved -- so we project our weakness onto other readers or viewers and we demand that news media do a better job of censoring the news for us.

That's why we don't see the terrorist video of Islamic ritual beheadings. Oh, we hear about it and we "tut-tut, that's horrible" and go on about our merry way to the cinema, or the job, or the supermarket. But it doesn't make an impression on us. It's antiseptic. An idea only, non-bloody and therefore, not really real. Oh, but to show those videos on the news, why it would just devastate the families of those poor victims! Wake up, people! The families are already devastated. What will trouble them even more in the coming weeks and months is the complacency of their fellow citizens, the forgetfulness that comes so easily when a tragic image is not burned into our memories, the inevitable lack of concern for their loss.

There are certain images that have stayed with us through the years. American soldiers given a heroes welcome at the liberation of Paris. Jackie Kennedy cradling the bloody head of her husband on the back of a presidential limo speeding to a Dallas hospital. The little naked, napalm-burned Vietnamese girl running from her burning village. The body of that Kent State student lying on the sidewalk, another student wailing over her. To name but a few ...

These and others brought people to understand, and to consensus about certain things. Yet today we are thought to be too sophisticated, too nuanced, too sensitive in our way of thinking. Somehow we have transcended the need for graphic reminders?

Nonsense. We are merely hiding our heads in the sand. We hide from truth in all shapes and sizes, preferring instead the false reality of entertainment and the false security of our antiseptic lives. If we are not careful it will be our undoing.