Tragedy Tourism and the Business of Mourning: How America Turned Death Into Content

Tragedy has become a trend, not a reckoning. We reward attention without memory and outrage without outcomes. This is not moral awakening, it’s cognitive dissonance on autoplay.”

Editorial Opinion | Don Allen

We are no longer informed by tragedy, we consume it.

There’s a difference. Being informed requires memory, context, and follow-through. Consumption requires only attention. Scroll. React. Move on. What we are doing now is tragedy tourism: riding waves of human suffering as if they were trending destinations, stopping just long enough to feel something before boarding the next outrage flight.

Think about how quickly we forget.

A white woman stabbed to death on a New York subway, brutal, senseless, terrifying. It lit up headlines, dominated feeds, and then disappeared. No sustained conversation about public safety, mental health, transit systems, or how we protect everyday people navigating shared spaces. Just a spike in attention, then silence.

Christians being killed in the continent of Africa… Once framed as a defining moral struggle of our generation. Now it barely interrupts the algorithm unless something explodes spectacularly enough to compete with celebrity gossip or political theater. Thousands still dying. Cities still destroyed. But attention has moved on.

And locally, right here in the Twin Cities (MN), we have perfected the art of forgetting our own.

Jamar Clark. Killed by police in 2015. The protests were loud. The demands were clear. Accountability? Murky at best. His name surfaces occasionally, usually when another tragedy forces us to dust off old wounds for rhetorical convenience.

The Smith kid killed at the downtown Minneapolis YMCA. A place that is supposed to represent safety, community, youth development. That story didn’t become a movement. It became a moment, and moments are easy to abandon.

And then the endless list: people pulled over by law enforcement who somehow end up dead. Traffic stops that become funerals. Families left with questions instead of justice. Each case arrives with hashtags, statements, and solemn faces, until the next case arrives and replaces it.

This is doom surfing. Riding a trend wave of tragedy without ever paddling toward understanding or change. There I go; I forgot George Floyd, Tamar Rice, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Tragedy tourism thrives on attention without substance. It rewards emotional reaction over nuanced thinking. It allows people to feel morally engaged without being intellectually or civically responsible. You don’t have to know the policy. You don’t have to stay with the story. You just have to show up briefly, loudly, and then disappear.

That’s not empathy. That’s performance.

There was a time in Minnesota when our famous people came from creation. Prince. Bob Dylan. Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. Artists. Thinkers. Builders. People known for what they made. Now, too often, our most recognizable names are attached to death. We don’t export culture, we export tragedy. We don’t celebrate achievement, we memorialize loss. And even then, we do it briefly, inconsistently, and selectively.

Tragedy tourism exposes a deep cognitive dissonance. People claim to care deeply about justice, safety, and humanity, yet resist the slow, uncomfortable work of nuanced thinking. Real change demands patience. It demands sitting with complexity. It demands admitting that slogans don’t solve systems and that outrage is not a strategy.

Nuance is hard. Trends are easy.

Algorithms don’t reward sustained attention; they reward novelty. Media ecosystems don’t ask, “What changed?” They ask, “What’s next?” And we’ve trained ourselves to follow that logic, mistaking constant awareness for actual responsibility.

But tragedy isn’t content. It’s not a series. It doesn’t exist to be binged and forgotten.

If we actually cared, really cared, we would track outcomes, not just incidents. We would ask what policies changed after each death. We would remember names not just when it’s convenient, but when budgets are written, when laws are debated, when leadership is evaluated.

We would stop pretending that posting is participation.

Tragedy tourism allows us to avoid accountability, personal and collective. It lets institutions wait out public attention until the noise fades. It lets leaders issue statements instead of solutions. And it lets the public feel righteous without being rigorous.

Minnesota, and America, doesn’t need more outrage. It needs memory. It needs continuity. It needs people willing to stay with the story after the cameras leave.

Until we break the habit of doom surfing, we will keep confusing attention with action and mourning with movement. And tragedy will keep winning, not because it is inevitable, but because we refuse to do anything with it once the trend passes.

That’s not compassion. That’s tourism.

And it’s costing us far more than we’re willing to admit.