The Picture is Never Crystal Clear

My yoga class was wrapping up today and the teacher said in her final words, “Remember that with any judgment you make, you only had part of the picture.” This struck me specifically because just earlier today I sat frustrated and sad at my desk because a woman in Florida lost her son to heatstroke while she was in a nail salon getting a manicure before her wedding which was planned later that day. The headlines read “Boy Dies After Being Left in Sweltering Car for More Than 2 Hours” and “Boy, 4, ‘boiled to death’ in 139F car after his mother went for manicure on her wedding day.” Try this for an experiment. Type in “Boy dies in car while mom at nail salon” into Google. At the time of writing, a majority of stories dramatized the story by making it appear that the mother had purposely left her child in the car. But upon reading almost every article, you’ll find within about four paragraphs that it is quite likely that the child snuck back into the car and hid behind the seats of the SUV after his mom dropped off other children at a relative’s house. But you would never know this from the headlines. A grieving mother loses her son and all the media can do is blame her on the front page and exonerate her on the inside page. How many people scan the front page and never click through to the story? Newspapers have always jumped for the opportunity to use a cliffhanger headline – but at least newspaper headlines are followed by the full story within a centimeter. The Internet can’t be so crass, without creating a lot of false rumors and needless victims.

Just like we never know the full story when we’re in a simple conversation that has the words “she said, he said” spoken throughout, we never know the full story about any topic. There’s always a piece we’re missing and judgment will always come at the risk of our compassion.