Illustration: Brendan Lynch/Axios
On an icy Feb. 1 in Tennessee, mourners gathered in a Memphis church and vowed to keep Tyre Nichols on America’s conscience. “Let’s never let them forget Memphis,” attorney Ben Crump said.
- By most measurements, it already has. The most convenient way to cope with one terrible news event in 2023 is to move on to the next one. But there’s a cost: America’s distraction addiction is numbing us into inaction and acceptance.
The big picture: That’s a sign of far more than America’s short attention span, people who have tried to confront the nation’s social illnesses tell me. It’s a sign of a country that’s become indifferent to tragedy, and unable to have a national conversation long enough to prevent the next one.
“I don’t think we’ve cried enough yet,” says the Rev. William Barber II, the prominent civil rights leader who resurrected MLK’s Poor People’s Campaign. “Sometimes a nation needs to be made to cry if it’s going to change.”
- “The media flips the pages,” Barber adds. “It’s almost like we treat bad public policy like it’s a commercial.”
Nichols was a 29-year-old father who loved the opera and ollies. He was driving home while Black in January when officers from a now-disbanded rough-’em-up police unit pulled him over and fatally beat him.
In 2023 alone, the horror stories also include: A mass shooting that killed 11 people on Lunar New Year in an Asian American community in California.
State of play: By mid-March, Google searches for “Tyre Nichols,” which peaked Jan. 22-28, barely registered.
Consider Michigan State, and the shooting that left three students dead and five injured on Feb. 13.
- Washington Post reporter John Woodrow Cox has written hundreds of thousands of words on mass shootings.
- After Michigan State, Cox found a new, horrifying angle: a young woman who had lived through a mass shooting in high school was now a college freshman living through another.
What he’s saying: Cox, who will become a father himself this summer,…
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