"Shame!"
Fred Thrower didn’t have a slidemaker.
So he got a piece of glass, covered it with dust, and had one word written on it with a finger.
And for two hours and forty minutes on June 5, 1968, viewers who turned on TV station WPIX saw just that one word:
Shame.
Fred Thrower was the president of WPIX, Inc. in 1968. Like the rest of the country, he awoke to the horrible news that Robert F. Kennedy, presidential candidate (and father of our current Health and Human Services secretary) had been shot. He would die the next day.
WPIX couldn’t get their news department up and running to broadcast anything by 8 a.m., the start of their broadcast day. This was in the era before 24-hour news broadcasting was common. But Fred Thrower thought it would be “ludicrous” to start the day with the usual programming.
So for two hours and forty minutes, until they could get their news program on the air, viewers saw the word “Shame” on WPIX.
Because, according to Fred Thrower, shame was what everyone should be feeling.
This past Wednesday, 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good was shot and killed by an ICE agent on a residential street in Minneapolis. Almost immediately, video started circulating. I found a posting of the video (aired here by CNN).
What I have been hearing in my head for the past three days has been a bystander first screaming, “No!” then, “Shame! Shame!” before launching into a profanity-filled tirade against the man who’d just fired the shots.
Shame. Shame on you. How many times have we used the phrase, “Shame on you!” Or, “I’m ashamed of you!” Or even, “I’m ashamed of myself.”
Merriam-Webster, in defining “shame”, uses the word “disgrace”. Synonyms of “disgrace” include “taint,” “stain,” “dishonor,” “infamy.”
What the bystander saw as shots were fired into Renee Good’s vehicle, striking her in the face and killing her, was an action of infamy, of dishonor, an action that will taint this person and this agency.
And so she reached for the one word to describe it all: “Shame!”
In the days to come, Renee Nicole Good will have a funeral and be laid to rest someplace. Her three children will mourn. Her wife - who was with her in the car when Renee was shot - will have this movie playing over and over in her memories and in her nightmares for the rest of her life.
New details will come out (yesterday, a new video was released taken by the ICE officer who shot Renee Good) and pieces of information will be gathered and assembled, and - hopefully - an accurate narrative formed.
And through all of it, that one word screamed on the video - “Shame!” - as Renee Good’s car careened down the street and crashed, it will echo.
Dishonor.
Disgrace.
Infamy.
Shame.
In the hours after Bobby Kennedy was shot, Fred Thrower put one image up on a TV screen that summed up the event.
That same image could very well be put up on a TV screen today.
Because it is what we should all be feeling right now.
Shame that a woman was shot.
Shame that we live in a country where it happened.
Shame that there are people who believe “she deserved it”.
Shame.
Just my .04, adjusted for inflation.
Powerful paralel between Fred Thrower's dusty glass slide in '68 and that bystander's scream. Single words can carry entire moral universes when the situation is so clearcut. The way dishonor and infamy collapse into shame especially when it's spoken in the moment, not after committee meetings or PR statements really captures how some actions are immediately recognizable as wrong. I remember feeling that gut punch of helplessness watching similar footage, wanting to reach through the screen and change what already happend.