Thread: Thousands of dead teenagers, ignored

Thousands of dead teenagers, ignored

The obsessive focus on Trayvon Martin distracts from many other tragic cases

By Kevin Kusinitz / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Wednesday, July 17, 2013, 4:30 AM


Uncredited/AP

15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton of Chicago was shot and killed earlier this year.

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Lost among the pontificating in the wake of the George Zimmerman trial, including New York’s mayoral hopefuls trying hard to out-outrage each other, is one sad fact.

In 2009, 2,439 American teenagers were killed by firearms. In 2010, the number was close to 2,000. (Mercifully, relatively few of these happened in New York City, where homicide rates are continuing to plummet.)

And I will bet you any amount of money that not one talking head or politician could name one of those victims. In fact, I’d wager that few if any of those teen deaths rated a mention on any network news program.

While Trayvon Martin’s parents quite rightly felt the support of millions of strangers worldwide, only a small circle of friends comforted the families of those 2,439 teenagers and the thousands like them, many of whom, like Trayvon, were unarmed and minding their own business.

There is something profoundly wrong — some might say sick — when the murder of an unarmed teenager is noticed by pundits only when there’s a “sexy” angle. A self-appointed neighborhood watchman confronting a black kid for wearing a hoodie and being armed with iced tea and Skittles? Sexy.

Or take the case of a 15-year-old girl gunned down by a gang member last January for no other reason than ducking under the wrong canopy in the rain. Had she been just another cheerleader, her death would have gone unnoticed by anyone outside her native Chicago.

But because she had just performed at President Obama’s inauguration a week before, she was “lucky” enough to be worthy of a nation’s attention for a news cycle or two. Just long enough for the likes of Bill O’Reilly, Rachel Maddow and Al Sharpton to blame the usual suspects until the next scandal caught their attention.
Do you think any of these TV stars would know the name of that girl today without a Google search?

Recently, three teenagers were murdered in Chicago in one night. Their names weren’t even mentioned in many of the online reports. If the killers are ever brought to justice — an unlikely scenario — I would like to know if Anderson Cooper will devote any time to their case.

Or if Lawrence O’Donnell will offer one of his patented, furrow-browed editorials mourning the dead while not-so-subtly excoriating the politicians “who allowed this to happen,” as if they were operating a “SHOOT/DON’T SHOOT” sign at the crosswalk.

It’s not like these professional moralizers don’t care. It’s just that they care more when the case fits a story line they find easy to present in a dramatic fashion. O’Donnell, after all, was a writer/producer for the hit series “The West Wing.” He knows how to spin a three-act story that holds the attention of a television audience.

It’s easy to imagine, in fact, a ripped-from-the-headlines TV episode based on the Trayvon Martin case. A gang-related shooting, not so much. First of all, those killers often get away with it, so there goes the neatly wrapped finale. And even if they’re caught, the logic seems to go, they’re just a bunch of “gangstas” anyway.

A wanna-be cop pulling the trigger? His victim is worth our attention. The rest, as Stalin might have said, are just statistics.

During the waning days of the 1996 presidential election, Bob Dole was ridiculed for ticking off a list of Bill Clinton’s perceived misdeeds, followed by a plaintive, “Where is the outrage?” Before this week is out — perhaps by the end of today — a far greater scandal than any Dole mentioned will likely occur. A few innocent teenagers will be shot on city streets across this great country. They will go unnamed by network news anchors and pundits alike. There will be no protests in Times Square or downtown L.A. Only the tears of grief-stricken families and friends will mark the children’s passing.

Where is the outrage?

Oh, the name of that murdered 15-year-old cheerleader was Hadiya Pendleton.

How soon we’re allowed to forget.

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/t...#ixzz2ZYK8maio

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During the waning days of the 1996 presidential election, Bob Dole was ridiculed for ticking off a list of Bill Clinton’s perceived misdeeds, followed by a plaintive, “Where is the outrage?” Before this week is out — perhaps by the end of today — a far greater scandal than any Dole mentioned will likely occur. A few innocent teenagers will be shot on city streets across this great country. They will go unnamed by network news anchors and pundits alike. There will be no protests in Times Square or downtown L.A. Only the tears of grief-stricken families and friends will mark the children’s passing.

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