215 bodies, but who really cares? 

This past week, a story briefly broke into the national news cycle about a graveyard found behind a Mississippi prison. At least 215 bodies were found in unmarked graves, much to the surprise of their relatives, who had never been notified of their deaths. The site was discovered by a local mother, Betterson Wade, whose son was among the dead found in the graves. She had spent seven months searching for her son, who had been declared missing by police, even though it was a police officer who had killed him. In what an internal investigation had determined was an “accident,” Dexter Wade was struck by a police car and killed while walking down the street. Although he had multiple forms of identification on him, the police failed to contact his relatives and never connected the dots of their failure; meanwhile, his mother spent months waging a campaign on social media searching for her son. His death is an emotional example, but not an outstanding one. Many more families are now finding out that their missing siblings, parents, cousins, or otherwise are dead and lying in unmarked graves. Inmates, homicide victims, homeless people and more predominantly black individuals were vilely disrespected, representing another factor in the systemic discrimination against poor minorities in states like Mississippi.  

This is a grave issue, one that touches upon our country’s issue of systemic racism and demonstrates a violation of sanctity that goes against our basic notions of humanity and respect on an incredible level. Yet, in terms of the attention it gained on a national level, it flashed quickly before almost completely disappearing from the public eye. From my personal experience, I know many of my friends knew absolutely nothing about the story, and it is why I use it as an example for the next point of this article.  

We are bombarded daily by news. Social media, especially TikTok, has taken the speed of our media cycle and increased it drastically. The conditioning of these sites has driven up our need to consume more and more information at a quicker pace. If something is not immediately impactful or interesting enough, it is often passed over for the next story in a line stretching off to infinity. The problem is that this isn’t healthy for us. In the past two weeks, there were massive developments in the Jeffrey Epstein trial, but how long did we really focus on that (aside from memes about Stephen Hawking) before obsessing over Gypsy Rose-Blanchard or rallying against Jo Koy? Overconsumption of media is becoming one of the biggest barriers to societal change because how can anyone truly be mad about anything when they’re too busy being distracted by everything else, all at once?  

Now, I understand that not all people want to focus on all the bad things of the world all the time, as there is the opposite end of the spectrum where things like “doom-scrolling” exist, where we become simply paralyzed by the sheer scale of the problems facing us. Fatigue in this sense is just as detrimental to anybody truly advocating for a better world. Whether it’s fixating on superficial news or  bad news, the point is that this is inherently a form of overconsumption demanding more which will leave all of us detached from making change in the real world.  

I remember in early 2020 when COVID-19 started and in 2021 when we were fresh off of January 6 where people online talked about how we were living in real historical moments and just joking around about potentially being drafted for WW3. Now in 2024, we see a similar situation with incredibly important historical events happening right before our eyes; yet this time, it feels like very few people are actually looking. The technological age has created a fierce demand for our attention, ripping us away from what is material and real and leaving us with a need for more. We need to learn to regulate better. Intentionality behind the usage of technology in connecting with the rest of the world is going to be the difference between being able to actually do anything about what we see or not, or at the very least whether or not we even remember it. 

To bring things back to the Wade Family and the Mississippi prison, as they are why all of this matters. All the placated feelings, distractions, quick stories and fast dopamine hits we get from our media cycle take away from our humanity. We are unable to care about the things that matter, the people who are hurt by systems much larger than us all around the world. The answer is to separate ourselves from the attention economy and addictive technology and connect more with ourselves and our humanity, so that we can care more about what is real in the hopes that, maybe, we’ll be able to do something about it.