News reporting and storytelling have different jobs in culture. One tells us what is happening, the other tells us what’s important.
There’s a reason that everyone from Aesop’s fables, to modern philosophers, to religious leaders including Jesus himself used stories to carry the weight of a moral teaching that was intended to change how the intended audience would live their lives.
Simply put: it’s an effective way to build culture. Because it’s much easier to get an audience to care about what happens to one person in a high-stakes fictionalized story than it is to care about dozens, hundreds, or even millions of people faced with life-and-death situations in the real world.
Stalin described the problem in the ruthless brutality so typical of a Soviet: “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”
Part of the reason ‘The Sound Of Freedom’ was such a powerful and successful film (it recently crossed the $150 Million mark) is that it did something similar with human trafficking and one little girl’s story that Schindler’s List did with another little girl wearing a red jacket.
Whether the girl in a story like these was the accurate account a single individual or an amalgam placeholder of multiple real stories, it doesn’t change the power or purpose of the film.
In giving those of us who have never encountered horrors like the Holocaust or the criminal exploitation and slaver of children a context and framework in which we can better understand them, the one little girl in each story (and all the others represented by her) can shift from the cold, soulless realm of statistical tables and newspaper broadsheets to the far more personal world of shattered families and broken-hearted children suffering very real fear and pain with no end in sight.
No end in sight unless somebody bigger and stronger than them can come to their rescue.
Liberation in the Holocaust was delivered by (among others) American GIs. That is a bright mark in our history that not even the dourest critic can take away.
Liberation of the kind of children seen in The Sound Of Freedom comes from another kind of heroic service. Law enforcement.
A powerful story helps cut through the deliberate media silence.
Remember when the left ran endless stories blaming President Trump for ‘separating families’?
When Donald J. Trump was in office, the media loved talking about stories of ‘children separated from families’ because it was an emotionally compelling way to damage an administration they wanted to take down.
AOC staged that famous photo op of her crying in front of a chain link fence. Time Magazine even falsified a magazine cover, with Trump looking down at a crying little girl from Honduras. That little girl had never been separated from her mother. But the damage was done.
Fast forward to January of 2021. Immigration numbers are surging. People are crowded into makeshift shelters. There are reports of abuse within those government-provided shelters. But those stories never generate the same headlines or outrage now that Biden is in office.
Here are two real life news stories whose power can only be fully understood once someone has come face-to-face with the kind of personal stories shown in The Sound of Freedom.
Texas announced 900 children have been rescued from the clutches of child traffickers.
.@TxDPS Troopers in Eagle Pass arrested an illegal immigrant from Mexico for smuggling 7 illegal immigrants, including 2 children, who were being smuggled to San Antonio.
During #OperationLoneStar, Troopers have rescued over 900 children from smuggling/trafficking events. pic.twitter.com/zy0l84zW1u
— Chris Olivarez (@LtChrisOlivarez) July 21, 2023
Have you heard the Partisan Press sounding any alarms about the levels of trafficking at the border? Or were they too busy trying to discredit the film that got people talking about it?
For a point of reference, as recently as November 3, 2021 — 10 months into JOE’s term in office — CNN was still keeping score on how many children had been ‘separated from families’ under Trump’s presidency. Headline: Parents of 270 children separated at border under Trump have still not been found, court filing says
But 270 is a smaller number than 900, right?
And this is the number of kids that have been rescued from traffickers. What happened to the rest of he 85,000 kids Joe Biden’s government *officially* cannot account for? How many of them are sold into sexual slavery, or are stuck filling cereal boxes in the night shift at eight years old to ‘pay off’ a ‘debt owed’ the adults who brought them to the ‘freedom’ waiting for them in Biden’s America?
Without a story like this film, the figure of 900 children rescued would be a big number but nothing more concrete than that.
With a story there is personhood, pathos. Suddenly we see children and shattered families on a scale past any easy calculation. The high school I attended seemed big to me at the time. But there were maybe five or six hundred students there. This is almost twice that number.
If today’s media took this story seriously, they would use images and points of reference like that one. Pictures our minds can lock onto and make sense of.
But you can’t talk about that story without talking about Biden’s open border policy… and for some counterintuitive political motives they have no interest in reversing that policy any time soon.
The same media that hammered Trump relentlessly on the border and how people coming over it were treated — especially children — have fallen silent now that such stories reflect badly on Joe.
Two murdered FBI agents serving a warrant unlock 98 international arrests
Laura Schwartzenberger and Daniel Alfin were special agents murdered in the line of duty while serving search warrants in Florida in a crimes against children case.
They died in the line of duty, but they did not die in vain.
At the end of the story, their work led to the arrest of 98 people around the world… and 13 precious children were released from the grip of child-destroying monsters.
Almost 100 people in the United States and Australia have so far been arrested over child sexual abuse allegations after the fatal shooting of two FBI agents led to the unraveling of a suspected international pedophile ring, officials announced Tuesday.
The Australian Federal Police (AFP) said that 19 men had been arrested on charges of sharing child abuse material online, while at least 13 children were rescued from further harm as a result of a joint operation with the FBI, dubbed “Operation Bakis.”
The development brought the total number of people arrested as part of the joint probe up to 98, with at least 79 arrests so far carried out by the FBI, according to the Australian agency. — NBC
Many of those arrested were technologically savvy.
Cross-posted with Clash Daily
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