I'm beginning to think that Morgan Freeman was absolutely right.

Today in the United States of America, the Department of Homeland Security is ramping up security measures at all federal buildings in the nation, largely in response to an incident that took place in Canada a country where acts of terrorism have been virtually unheard of until just now. The act of a lone individual with a twisted mind that took the life of a ceremonial guard, Cpl. Nathan Cirillo, at the Canadian War Memorial across from Parliament Hill. Why? Well frankly, simply because of the hysteria that the media has created over the incident.

There is a strong statement that has circulated on the internet that has been attributed to Morgan Freeman, that the media and we the general public are the ones responsible for perpetuating terrorism and terrorist attacks. While there is no real proof that it was Freeman that actually made that statement, the idea that it expresses clearly seems to be completely true.

All too often, we the public, seem to confuse our RIGHT to know with our NEED to know and the media takes full advantage of that in that it panders to our basest and most perverse desires to find out all the gruesome details of such events. Clearly we have both a right and a need to know when such events take place, the details of the event itself, and the results. I question however, if we have either the right or need to know all of the intimate details of the life of the perpetrators from the moment they were born.

Say the name Timothy McVeigh anywhere on the planet and anybody who hasn't been living in a cave knows exactly who you are talking about. Chances are they also know many of the details of his sordid little life too, but absolutely nothing about any of the 168 men, women and children who he killed. Amost everybody also knows who you're talking about when you mention the Tsarnaev brothers responsible for the bomb attack during the Boston Marathon. Same goes for people like Adam Lanza, the deranged 20 year old responsible for the school shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School that claimed 27 lives, all but two young children. We know all the minute details of his childhood and mental problems, but can any of us recall even one single bit of information about any of the victims or their names?

Why do we insist on turning somebody who is essentially a loser and a nobody during their lifetime into a somebody in death? It just doesn't make any sense whatsoever. When the media focuses such attention to these twisted individuals it is simply giving them exactly what they lacked in life that was the root cause of their horrific actions – ATTENTION. They were invisible, unknown, unimportant nobodies in life and somewhere in their twisted logic they decide to do something so terrible that their name will become a household word in death. We foolishly buy into that twisted logic and actually feed it when we demand to know every sordid little tidbit of information we can glean about them. The media in turn is more than willing to provide it too. This only encourages more such losers to come out of their little hole in the ground and commit similar atrocities.

I really am of the opinion that the media, as a whole, should be prohibited from divulging the names and the intimate details of any of suicide attack terrorists, school/workplace shooters, serial killers, etc. This would rob them of the exact thing they're seeking in the first place – fame and notoriety. This in itself would probably go a long way to preventing others from trying the same things in order to go out in a blaze of glory and obtain the attention and fame they could never hope to gain in life. Sure, it's not going to eliminate the problem completely and we all know that; but my bet is that it certainly would reduce it to a great extent.

Cheers,
William James Woodward, Expat-blog Experts Team