Desperate times

This will book end my string of haphazards posts. I just have some burning questions to ask.
When someone gets murdered or killed in the District or the Metro area, why isn't there a stop-what-you're-doing, t.v. commercial-interruption, all-hands on deck to find out what went wrong and why newscasts and media reports? Why is it NOT everything anyone talks about for a few days? Why isn't it a colossal tragedy that hurts us all?

Why do the newspapers devote free print to the Redskins, I would argue whorish levels of print to the Redskins, and to sports in general as opposed to, say, another, more persistent feature of the Washington area: homelessness and poverty? How about a poverty section in the paper? On television. Devoted only to that? It's part of our community after all, and in growing numbers judging by Council of Government reports and say, a stroll by Martha's Table.

Why don't we see, aside from on PBS, pictures of people who die in Iraq and Afghanistan and other places where open and covert and proxy wars are being fought in the name of Americans? What is the aversion, aside from the obvious obscenity, to seeing the fruits of our tax dollars?

Not rhetorical. I am genuinely curious what people think the answers to these questions are, and how news directors and agenda-setters would answer these questions. I want to know what everyone seems to think is so obvious. What am I missing?

I'm not asking for 24-hour-a-day outrage at the injustices of the world. I am just trying understand this unflagging ability for people to sleep walk through their lives, as if none of this affects them directly. How long can so many people abide this tacit compliance to ignore and thereby endorse the status quo? How long before their souls start screaming out of the seams? Has it already happened?

I don't know. If you're in a hypnotic enough state where you can't see what's right before your eyes I suppose this will sound like a tantrum rather than what I believe it is. A hope that people, for lack of something less cliche, wake up.