PopcornJackTerry

Brian Williams is in some deep doo-doo.

Naturally, lots of people have lots to say about this, so allow me to add my two-cents worth, even though ultimately this blog is about something else other than Brian Williams. It seems to me from what I have read about this – and I admit it is very little, but when has ignorance of an issue been a detriment to posting something on the internet? Just ask these people from Vermont – that if he had stuck by his original story, it would have been an almost factual story, the biggest lie being the lie of omission. It was the helicopter directly before his that got hit by an RPG. The fact that the helicopter was hit about 30 minutes before his took to the air should have no bearing on the story.

Needless to say, the lots that people have to say covers a wide range of subsets, all of which center around or at least include a passing relationship to whether he should stay on the air. It has made strange bedfellows out of previously barely connected people. People who support the war effort think he’s making a mockery of the sacrifice thousands make every day, and those who oppose the war believe that his actions have glorified the war and help lead to continuing overseas actions both would like to see him resign. Other news divisions smell the blood in the water and hope that the ousting of Brian Williams, and the general lack of trust in NBC News, will lead to a boost in their viewership. It seems that there is nothing that brings people together better than a scandal.

By now, one thing that is mentioned in the same breath as his fabricated story about the helicopter attack is his reporting from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. During that time, Brian Williams reported that he saw bodies floating in the waters that flooded the city. At the time, nobody paid too much critical attention to these claims, as they were overshadowed by the bungling of FEMA, the atrocities of the Superdome, and differences between being “a resourceful white person” and “a looting black person.” Now people are investigating his claims because they are looking for the true character of Brain Williams.

Successful jokes and academic thesises (thesisis? thesiss? thesi?) cite three examples in order to work: One time is an aberration, two times is a coincidence, three times is a trend. To become a saint you need proof of three miracles; to cross a desert you need three people, just so the third can bring the car door, so when it gets hot they can roll down the window. The reporting from Katrina becomes important because it starts to tip the scales of public perception from that of “stupid mistake, but it was just one time” to “hmmm, this seems to be something Brian Williams does a lot.” The question becomes does one event have the ability to define who we are?

The answer is yes.

I’ve done a lot of dumb things in my life. It’s hard to make it to 43 and not be able to say that. Some of the dumb things I’ve done have been just that: dumb mistakes everyone makes. Others have been so epic on the scale of dumbness that it boggles the mind. Now, to some people these epically dumb things are the pure expression of who I am, personality-wise. They see them as the rule and not the exception. There is any number of factors that I’m sure go into creating that decision – how long we’ve known each other, how close they were to the epicenter of my stupidity, reflections of past behavior by other people in their lives – and if you present a situation, such like the one Brian Williams is in now, to 100 different people and ask what you think should be done about it, your bound to get at least a dozen distinct answers, if not more.

My mother is not getting any younger (are any of us?) and lately her, my brother and I have been talking about what’s next for her, since her retirement last summer. This weekend I was visiting her and we played several games of cribbage as we normally do. One point she was shuffling and managed to drop the cards. Not just mis-shuffle them, and not have one or two slip from her fingers, but lose control of the entire deck. If I were to do this at my age, a joke would easily be made and the incident quickly forgotten. But my mother isn’t my age. She admits to feeling like she is losing her sharpness mentally, she tires easily and usually feels cold, and it is rare when their isn’t some part of her that aches.

If my brother and I were quick to ship her off to a home, I could look at this temporary physical foible, raise the red flag and arrange for her to be taken away. A person could see it and think “If she loses control of a deck of cards, she’ll probably also lose control of a car.” Another person could merely think she simply picked them up awkwardly and never give it a second thought. It boils down to the importance given to one particular act.

Granted, there is a wide distance between what happens to a person as they naturally age and what a person like Brian Williams choose to say or do. In simple terms, it is the difference between a conscious act and an unconscious act. Regardless, it is how we choose to view a person and their words and deeds when we evaluate their presence in our lives. I have lost friends over the past year because of who I’ve been and what I’ve done. Some I am not the least surprised about, while others have reasons that are less clear to me. Narcissistic masochist that I am, my assumption is because I did or said something to them, or they witnessed some act of my behavior, and I was too busy being self involved to notice how it affected them. Likewise, I’ve had other people who thought they might lose me as a friend because of how they perceive their actions in view of how I’m living my life these days.

What we choose to accept, what we just to forgive and what we choose to reject are all choices we each make daily on an individual basis. We may have a different reaction to the same action or words when done by different people in our lives, and we may change our reaction when the same person repeats a particular action or words, all of which hinges on the level of importance of that person in our lives. I don’t watch the evening news, ever, so I don’t care that Brian Williams lied, and what happens to him the future is not going to affect my life, unless he loses his job and ends up getting a job as a bus driver, and some day I am not paying attention when I step off a curb and the bus he’s driving hits me. But in that case, it doesn’t matter if it’s Brian Williams, Venus Williams or the Venus de Milo driving the bus. What matters is that I didn’t look both ways before I crossed the street.

I don’t really have an answer to that dilemma, to deciding what the parameters are for accepting, forgiving and rejecting, because I believe they are both different for each of us and fluid as we grow and become better people, so I’ll end with this: I know I said I wasn’t going to talk a lot about Brian Williams, but one of the things I’ve learned from my job is keyword saturation. You see, there is a sweet spot when it comes to using words that are trending, like Brian Williams. (I bet if I had spelled it like #BrianWilliams I would have been doing myself an even bigger favor.) Use the trending words too little and it doesn’t show up in a search engine. use it too often and it gets rejected by the search engine as spam. But if I say Brian Williams just enough times, it will hopefully draw people here who are not interested in what I have to say and are instead just curious about Brian Williams. I know, I know. It’s a cheap shallow marketing ploy that is borderline slick, all in a desperate ploy to attract more attention to myself and garner more fame.

Brian Williams would be proud.