It’s hard to imagine a more horrific story–a husband and wife arguing violently, then the husband pulling a knife, stabbing his wife to death, then killing himself—all this while the children were in the house.
The Forsyth Police Department has declared Monday’s tragedy in Sawyer a homicide-suicide.
The trauma for the five children is hard to fathom and now they’re left with these indelible memories, and they’re left without parents.
All this is prelude to what happened immediately afterwards, on the Internet.
WLUC has a highly popular website, uppermichiganssource.com, that gets almost two million page vews a month. One of the features is a Comment section below each news story. If you read a story and you want to express your opinion about it, you’re invited to go ahead and post it anonymously.
Unfortunately, after reading the frequently updated stories about the Sawyer tragedy, some people felt free to write cruel, nasty and inane comments about the incident. Maybe, from the safety of their home or business, they felt it was appropriate to be insulting or jocular about a homicide-suicide and five orphaned children. They didn’t have to face anyone, they didn’t have to be accountable for their words; they just had to bang out their daring and humorous comments on their keyboards, and then chuckle about it afterwards when others took umbrage at their words.
That’s the problem with the Internet. Just about anybody can say anything about anything, and for many people, the more provocative, the better. Cruelty’s fine, obscenity’s fine, even slander is fine.
In the news business, we refer to the Internet as the “wild, wild west.” Anything goes.
The devil is unleashed, and it’s hard to say whether we’ll ever get control over it. What we’ll need to do is get control over outselves. Good luck to us.
Fortunately, there is another side to the Internet in the Sawyer story. People connected by the web are now working together to make Christmas for the five children who’ve just endured an unspeakable trauma a little happier.
They’ve started a Secret Santa campaign to put some presents under the tree for the kids on Christmas.
If you want to help out, you can click here and it’ll take you to the site:
So yes, the Internet does provide a forum for those who are thoughtless and cruel, but fortunately it also allows us to reach out, as we never have before, and help those in need.
Let’s see what we can do to help these kids.