The Temptation to Disengage

I recently finished up a new book, “Eliza and the Midwife: A Story in Human Trafficking,” coming this month from Frontier Press. It’s an account of a fascinating historical event in the early days of The Salvation Army, when a concerted effort by a coalition of prominent London residents raised the age of consent in Great Britain. As part of their strategy, a thirteen-year-old girl, Eliza Armstrong, was purchased for prostitution to prove how easily it could be done. Through a series of lurid articles in the Pall Mall Gazette, one of London’s newspapers, the details of the underworld of brothels were exposed to all of London and beyond through ink on newsprint.

As I worked on this nineteenth century narrative, I thought about how the media in today’s world might have covered Eliza’s story. The young woman who went undercover in a brothel might have worn a hidden camera, hourly social media posts and tweets from W.T. Stead (the newspaper editor) would have kept the public informed, and Anderson Cooper would have gotten sound bites from Eliza’s parents and Queen Victoria. No need to wait two weeks for the six-part newspaper series.

The expansion of media coverage that has happened in my lifetime fills our every waking moment with real-time tragic events from every continent. As a result, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the destructive winds swirling around us. Some days, I long to breathe, “Calgon, take me away.” Yet even my fantasy escape routes are failing me, as Downton Abbey is finished, the Good Wife is on her last legs, and Tony is leaving NCIS. What’s a girl to do?

I re-discovered one possible escape outlet that I described on Facebook recently: “Sitting with the husband watching Jeopardy. We are old.” Disclaimer: I do like Jeopardy, so no hate mail please. Jeopardy is mentally challenging, and there’s probably been a study done about its ability to prevent Alzheimer’s disease, especially if accompanied by a nightly dish of ice cream.

In my younger years, I watched game shows a lot. Jeopardy, Concentration, Let’s Make a Deal, and Password were favorites, and I especially liked Supermarket Sweep, where people went on shopping sprees to find the highest ticket items so their carts rang up the maximum cash register tape. In preparation for my own possible appearance as a contestant, I plotted my shopping route around Loblaws, and also dreamed up heart-wrenching sob stories to plead my case on Queen for a Day (another youthful favorite).

It’s tempting to turn to game shows and other outlets to escape the reality of our world. Disengagement beckons me, and like the sirens of Greek mythology, its wooing is seductive. Don’t watch that debate, watch me instead. Don’t get involved. After all, someone else will step up.

How much responsibility do we have for our community, our country, our world? As man’s inhumanity to man invades our homes, our computer screens, and our phones, it’s no wonder we’re tempted to tune them out and sink into re-runs of Everyone Loves Raymond or Jeopardy. But as Alan Paton, the South African author of “Cry, the Beloved Country” understood, “There is only one way in which one can endure man’s inhumanity to man, and that is to try, in one’s own life, to exemplify man’s humanity to man.” Truth.

Yet is our world worse than the one Eliza Armstrong faced in 1885? Despite the pervasive doomsday messages of the media, Dr. Bradley Wright paints an alternative picture in “Upside: Surprising Good News About the State of our World.” In his research, he discovered our world is getting better. In the U.S., literacy is up and crime is down, and Americans live longer than ever before. Worldwide, 95% of countries surveyed show an increase in life expectancy, education and income.

The media has a responsibility to expose the darkness. Jeopardy has a responsibility to entertain. We have a responsibility to keep each in perspective, even in an election year. To paraphrase Ecclesiastes, “There is a time for CNN, and there is a time for Jeopardy.” Now hand me the remote, please.