A Nation That Mourns Selectively Is a Nation That Has Lost Its Moral Compass
When One Story Dominates While Thousands Go Untold
Let me be absolutely clear from the start: I am in no way minimizing, dismissing, or making light of the abduction, kidnapping, or disappearance of Savannah Guthrie's mother. This is a family in anguish and watching a daughter—regardless of who she is—make a tearful, emotional plea for her mother's safe return is painful. I hope there is a swift positive resolution and for this family.
But this situation is about something more and may be gnawing at millions of Americans and discussed privately rather than publicly. Well then, I will pull the band aid off.
Savannah Guthrie is a media personality. She's a prominent figure at NBC News, co-anchoring the Today show for over a decade. When tragedy strikes someone with fame, with connections, with a platform that reaches millions, the national media machine roars to life. CNN runs live updates. The New York Times covers it. The BBC picks it up. Drones hover over the neighborhood. Federal resources mobilize. The story dominates the news cycle for days.
And it should. Nancy Guthrie is an 84-year-old woman with serious health conditions, taken from her home in the middle of the night. Every resource available should be deployed to bring her home safely.
Now that I made that clear, the haters will spew forth with twisted rhetoric. Don’t do that, it’s childish. Let’s continue.
Here's the view I’ve long held: What about the thousands of other families?
Every single day in this country, people disappear. Mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters are murdered. Children vanish. The elderly and frail of all ages are victimized. Working-class Americans in small towns and forgotten neighborhoods experience similar gut-wrenching horror that the Guthrie family is experiencing right now. And for most of them? A brief mention in the local paper at best, and by an AI bot at that. Maybe a fifteen second segment on the local evening news if they're lucky; which few watch, and then silence.
We watched this selective compassion play out for years. Remember when simply saying "all lives matter" could get you de-platformed, fired, or publicly shamed? The only acceptable phrase was "Black Lives Matter," and if you dared suggest that every human life holds equal value, you were branded a bigot. The irony was suffocating.
Now look at how the media operates when one of their own faces tragedy. The coverage is wall-to-wall. The empathy flows freely. Resources appear. The nation stops and watches as we did during the O.J. Simpson fiasco.
But when a truck driver's wife in Florida is killed in a carjacking? When a retired teacher in rural Georgia is beaten to death in her home? When a child who doesn't fit the media's preferred narrative goes missing? Those stories are buried, if they're covered at all.
This isn't about politics. This is about the value of human life. If you believe, as I do, that we are all created equal in the eyes of God, then you have to wrestle with why some victims command national attention while others are forgotten before the week is out.
The answer is uncomfortable: We have become a society that assigns different values to different lives based on fame, fortune, and narrative convenience. That's not justice. That's not Christian. That's not American.
I genuinely hope Nancy Guthrie is found safe and returned home. But my sympathies are equal when it comes to the countless families across this nation whose pain never makes the evening news, whose loved ones disappear without a single helicopter overhead, whose tears fall in silence while the leftist lunatics in places like Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and Portland look the other way.
Every life matters. Every victim deserves compassion. Every family deserves answers.