Blog #14

Living Dangerously

The story of the July, 2009 murder of Natalia Estemirova in the "Retro-Russia" reminded me of an incident with two students in my Video Production class.

If the name, Estemirova, doesn't ring a bell, she was abducted in broad daylight in front of her home in July, 2009 and executed. She apparently had gotten too good at her job exposing human rights abuses in the Kremlin and it's Chechen proxies.

It wasn't that she wasn't telling the truth -- she was telling the truth, and that was the problem.

Now to those two students.

One of the videos submitted in my university Video Production class was a sky-diving story -- complete with the student jumping out of an airplane. It was dramatic and scary.

I felt a need to repeat the speech I give at the beginning of each semester: although attention-getting stories are important, I didn't want anyone risking his or her life for a class assignment.

The sky-diving student looked squarely at another student (a bit of rivalry there?) and said, "It's a lot safer than drag racing on some street." The message was clear, and we all knew that a young man had recently been killed drag racing on a major street not far from the campus.

I thought about that for a couple days, and after assuring them that I just wanted to "talk about things," I asked them both to come to my office.

I soon got the message that they were doing what they were doing solely for the excitement -- death-defying excitement.

I told them the story of a journalist that had been murdered a few years before and said, "He found excitement doing what he did, but it was for a cause greater than just a few moments of personal excitement.

I told them some of the instances where he exposed some major wrongdoing and how he used sophisticated surveillance techniques to expose corruption. (Did you know that whether your cell phone is "on" or "off," someone with the right computer program can hear everything in its area?)

This journalist had established a reputation for doing solid, legally-admissible research on his stories. In the process of exposing illegal activities in high places he had stepped on powerful toes.

He was living dangerously 24/7.

His death was well orchestrated, attesting to the level of threat that some powerful people thought he represented.

The drag race student considered it. "So he's dead."

"Yes, but it wasn't exactly a wasted life, was it?"

-Ron Whittaker

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