Flight 370

The American public doesn’t like waiting. We are a must-have-it-now society: instant communications with Facebook, Twitter, email, texting, chat; instant answers with our favorite search engines; one hour dry cleaners; fast food; instant coffee, instant tea, instant mashed potatoes, minute rice.

In the absence of knowledge about what happened to flight 370, we speculate. However, speculation has no lasting value. It doesn’t generate new facts. It doesn’t generate conclusions. It’s like licking a lollipop – it provides momentary satisfaction of our demand for answers, but then it fades away as we realize we don’t have any more answers than we did.

And yet cable news tries to satisfy our hunger for answers. The journalists talk to experts and talk with each other, rehashing countless times what we already know, which is very little. At the end of the day we know as much as we did at the beginning of the day.

A week and a half after the jet disappeared, almost any relevant question about it can be answered with the words, “No one knows.” Was it hijacked? Was its disappearance terrorism? Did the crew divert it? Was there a mechanical failure? Was there a fire? Did it land somewhere? Did it crash? Where is it now? Are the passengers alive or dead? All are reasonable questions, and all have the same answer.

No one knows.

In America in 2012, 34,080 people died in automobile accidents. That is 655 people per week, every week. In 10 days, the number of days flight 370 has been missing, 934 people have died on American roads. Almost a thousand people die in America from automobile accidents every 10 days – the last 10 days, the next 10 days, the 10 days after that. And it doesn’t stop. It doesn’t pause. If flight 370 crashed, that is a tragedy for families and friends of those traveling on it, and the cause will be a mystery we must try to solve to make flying safer. But is it logical for cable news to devote 90% of its airtime to a news story when there is no actual “news” – just a one-time tragedy to be recounted over and over? Is it logical to spend day after day reporting on an event that killed 239 people, when that same number of people are killed on American roads every two and a half days? No, it’s not really logical. But humans, when confronted with a mystery, have to solve it. And we want it solved now.

Until the jetliner is found, its story will be told over and over.  It’s the tune that is number one with a bullet; the book that stays at the top of the best-seller list. In lieu of instant answers, it’s what we have to have.