The depth of human suffering, as seen on TV

I couldn’t watch most of the tsunami media coverage. The preliminary reports were fine. There… I couldn’t watch most of the tsunami media coverage. The preliminary reports were fine. There was something comforting about their terseness, the expressionless delivery of facts: an earthquake, a wall of water, so many thousand reported dead or missing.But after these reports, I had to shut off the television or flip past the front page, because following the basic news came the tales of struggles for survival.

These are newsworthy stories, intended to give a human face to an incomprehensibly large disaster. But when the reporters shoved a microphone at Swedish tourists who swam to safety, or an Aceh girl who clung to the top of a palm tree while her classmates drowned, I couldn’t watch. There was something voyeuristic about it, hearing their stories. My survivor’s guilt made me turn the channel or reach for the Style section.

It’s an obvious reaction, really. When great tragedy strikes, those who live have to wonder what accident spared them while others died, what series of events, what far-off butterfly’s wings let us live, while others were washed away.

And this goes double when the closest we get to tragedy is what’s on the evening news. There’s something unsettling, even revolting, about witnessing the depth of human suffering, as brought to you by cable news. There’s something nauseating about watching a pressed-and-polished anchor talk glibly about cholera, typhoid and dysentery while video footage of the destruction loops in the background.

General disgust with TV aside, I couldn’t identify what exactly bothered me until I flipped on the local news one night. The team at WTAE reported that someone hanged him- or herself from the Homestead Grays Bridge near the Waterfront, disrupting traffic for hours while rescue workers had to cut down the body. The reporter on the scene interviewed shocked witnesses, who recounted what they’d seen with the appropriate solemnity. Traffic, the anchors said, returned to normal, or normal for Friday rush hour.

But there was not a word about the suicide, which is understandable, considering taking one’s own life is a private, deeply troubling act, even when it’s done as a spectacle.

That didn’t stop the fiction-major hamster wheel in my brain from spinning out possible scenarios in order to give this person a life, when all we knew about was his or her death.

Maybe he was an old steel worker who hated the commercialization of the Waterfront shopping arena. Or maybe she had been the wife of a Grays player who was protesting Washington, D.C.’s decision to name its baseball team the Nationals instead of the Grays. Or maybe he was dying of a rare, tragic disease and felt that public suicide would be the only way to get euthanasia legalized. Or maybe …

Whoever this person was, I wanted to give him a life, one with specificity and meaning. I wanted her to have sisters and uncles and happy, fat grandchildren, to give him a job he despised and a wife he didn’t, perhaps an ear for the violin, a taste for curry and lemonade.

And with all this tragedy, I want someone to speak for Sumatra’s dead, for Sri Lanka’s and Somalia’s and India’s and Thailand’s. We need someone to eulogize those people buried in unmarked graves or swept away, mutilated by water; for the mothers and sons, the convicts and the tourists and the royalty; for every small yet enormous death.

Instead of wresting some fable about the triumph of the human spirit, I want some reporter to utterly lose it on national TV, to cry and wail and beat his chest. I want people to stop treating this as The Greatest Natural Disaster in History, and start treating this on a human scale. Before we can know what we’ve gained — what global unity and what peace accords — we have to mourn.

Perhaps it’s too early. We have to wait until there isn’t the imminent threat of disease and unrest before the dead can be anything but corpses to be disposed of.

And I don’t pretend to be a skilled enough writer to translate even one life into letters and words and sentence structure. Because even with all the reports and updates and sidebars and commentaries, there aren’t enough words in any language to give the dead and missing voices.

Give money to Doctors Without Borders at www.doctorswithoutborders-usa.org. E-mail Sydney Bergman at sbergman@pittnews.com.