Media has made light of the concept of death.

With technology, war is brought from far off lands to peaceful suburbs thousands of miles away. Even though people hear about chaos, destruction and death much more than generations prior, it isn't the same as experiencing it. For people in the United States who don't have a member of the military in their family, it's easy to forget those people fighting battles and dying for their country aren't just another fictional tv show. It's easy to say a convict should be dead when they are so far away, and so much of their story is left untold.

There's a reason the death penalty is so controversial. The sentence is a final punishment. It is the ultimate justice for those who have commit so much wrong, done so much harm, that their own life is no longer worth the damage they have done to society. The death penalty must be carefully considered, and not abused. Giving another human the right to decide who lives and who dies is like giving them the power of a god, and even if some think it's necessary for the good of the rest of the world, it isn't a decision that should be taken lightly. Unfortunately, now death is such a constant force in people's lives that it is hard to think of death as serious as it is.

Television shows on every channel, video games, books and just about any other part of culture have overused death to the point where it is no longer as jarring as it once was. Plots that involve massive amounts of death or characters coming back to life don't give people an honest outlook on death. When too many people die in a book or a tv show, it is very difficult, almost impossible, to portray the seriousness of each death. Look at crime television shows, for example. In each episode at least one person is killed. Mourners are made into plot devices, and the deceased(however fictional they may be) are never given proper respect. Even though the characters are all fictional, the ideas from television like this work their way into people's minds, so that seeing a dead body on TV is no longer shocking-even when it's on the news, and it's anything but fictional.

Plots that involve reincarnation, or characters coming back from the dead, make a mockery out of the permanence of death. The death penalty is such a severe punishment because of how irreversible it is. There is absolutely no way to make amends for a wrongly accused criminal sentenced to death. Media, especially fantasy literature, almost make fun of this permanence. Characters die and return to Earth and die again, to the point where fans don't even believe that a character is really dead. It makes death seem so much easier to find loopholes around.

These aspects of death into media have made it seem like a much lighter subject than it is, but the main cause of this is truly the overwhelming amount of death in media. It is everywhere, there is no escaping it. Even children's shows can have mentions of death, or characters that die(albeit, in much tamer ways than one might see in any horror movie). The sheer overload of death throughout pop culture has made people desensitized to death. On a smaller level, some people might wish a hated character in one of their novels to die. Next, then, it's watching the news and thinking that a criminal from a city hundreds of miles away should be killed. It's just as easy to think that as the first situation; the criminal is so far away that he seems just as fake as the fictional character. These thoughts can escalate even turther, to thinking everyone in a particular religiou, social, or ethnic group should die. It's easier to take the permanence of death so scasually when media makes it out to be so miniscule.

Regardless of any religious beliefs, no one knows for sure what happens after death. There could be heaven, reincarnation, a whole lot of nothing, or something else that hasn't even been thought of yet. There's no way to know for sure, and that's why death is so terrifying. There's the fear of pain, of course, because it is so closely associated with death. But the true fear of death spurs from the fear of the unknown. We fear losing others because we will never be able to see them again, but some of us can be calmed by believing they are happier in heaven. Homicide is considered an unforgivable, heinous act because a murderer is stripping them from this world and condemning them to a fate that no one knows anything about. It's sentencing someone to an eternity of the unknown. The fact that this concept is becoming less of a serious issue and more of a plot device in media is truly frightening.