OldTroubador's blog post - Really?? I mean, REALLY???

It is the last day of my four day downtime. That means laundry, cleaning the inside of the truck, laying in a few supplies. Laundry is usually not too bad a chore; the television usually is tuned to the USA network or TBS and I can catch NCIS, some of the original shows on USA, or Law & Order. But today, the TV was on CNN and here is what I saw.
A panel of talking heads was prattling on and on about the Ray Rice video and case. They talked about Ray Rice, they talked about his fiance -Janay Palmer, they talked about the police response, the NFL response, his fiance's response. They talked about the NFL's probable cover-up, they talked about how much money Ray Rice stood to lose, they talked about how Mr. Goodell should step down, they talked about how wonderful the TMZ show was to get a copy of the video when no one else seemed to be able to. There was one thing they did not talk about.
Domestic Violence. They did not use their time to paint a broad picture of domestic violence in this country. From the pages of the National Coalition against Domestic Violence – 1.3 million women are victims of domestic violence a year, from a 2007 study. I saw figures ranging from 600,000 to 6,000,000. From other sources, namely CNN itself, we find that every minute, there are 24 victims of domestic abuse. That means that for every hour those talking heads rambled on about a football player, there were 1440 cases of domestic violence. One is four women are liable to be victims of domestic violence during their lifetime. Each day, at least three women are murdered by their husband or boyfriend. There are 3,800 animal shelters in this country; there are 1,500 for battered women. These facts are disturbing, to say the least.
Domestic violence is not just about physical violence; it is a terroristic act of one person against another. In addition to the physical scars, the psychological scars run deeper and take longer to heal, if they ever do. And the unspoken about victims of domestic violence, the witnesses, the children in these households, are also scarred; many of them will commit these acts or allow themselves to be victims because they “learn” that this is the “normal” way of life. It is an unending circle of violence and depravity that infests society today. And yet, one of the premier news groups in the nation decided to focus on one man, because of his celebrity, and the impact it would have on one sports organization, and chose to ignore its duty to the American public to indict society as a whole for allowing this kind of abuse to continue and its duty to tell the American public how we as a nation can help stop this type of violence.
What Ray Rice did was wrong. He dropped his fiance like Mike Tyson did Leon Spinks – but Spinks got a hefty payday for taking that hit. Yes, it appears that Janay Palmer hit Ray first, but that does NOT excuse Ray from using his vastly superior size and strength to coldcock her the way he did. Nor does it excuse CNN or any other news group from focusing on this one person and not focusing on the problem as a whole – telling folks that this is NOT right, telling women where to go for help, telling women that it is okay to call the police.
Rampage shootings, while horrific in content and unimaginably traumatic to the survivors, harm far, far fewer people per annum than domestic violence, and yet after every incident, there are strident calls for more laws, more police action, more societal controls. In this particular case, and in the O.J. Simpson case many years earlier, there were, and are, no such calls to action. I ask, WHY NOT???? This is not just an issue for the backwoods of Appalachia, the trailer parks of Texas, the Native American tribes, those who suffer from substance abuse. This is a fundamental problem across our society and yet, the news organizations of this country have once again confused celebrity and style over substansive and responsible reporting and chosen to ignore this dark epidemic that continues to weaken our society.
Each one of us needs to stand up, men and women, abused and friends of the abused, and say, THIS ENDS NOW. In light of the video shown today, we the people need to contact our legislatures and tighten the penalties against those who chose to commit domestic violence and NOT allow one's status or celebrity to be used as a bargaining chip for the mitigation of sentence to just counseling. We the people need to bring an end to domestic violence ourselves.