“Did you hear what happened?!” This was the quote of the day, as mass destruction tore a gaping hole in our country’s facade of seamless security. Radios crackled all over America. CNN blared loops of the morning’s horrifying events. And I saw people sucking up every bit of it on computer stills.

“Are you looking at the people jumping?” one of them asks. They all gather around the screen and stare in amazement at images of desperate suicides.

Americans are fascinated with violence and death. We can’t get enough of it — we’re drunk on blood, guts, bombs and chaos. It pervades our movies, music videos, TV shows and music. We aren’t satisfied with in-depth news reports. We need to see the photos and real-time video, while we hear graphic accounts and listen to newscasters surmise of the dead babies and teen-agers.

None of us seem to be above this fascination with death. Countless Web sites provide death shots of celebrities and ordinary, everyday corpses to satisfy our lust for all that sickens us. We clog traffic when we slow down to stare at an accident, hoping for a glimpse of some blood or a body part.

While watching the movie “The Rock,” starring Nicolas Cage and Sean Connery, with my roommate recently, I noticed something about the way the violence was handled. It wasn’t enough for one of the bad guys to be thrown over a cliff — we had to see him land on a spear-shaped chunk of metal, and watch his body writhe while he died. Other scenes show blood spurting from a person’s mouth in a multi-player bullet extravaganza. Of course, this is probably a tame example, when there’s fare like “Faces of Death” to satiate America’s bloodlust.

If these images are being seen by children now, what kind of adults are they going to grow into?

The line between over-exposure and censorship is razor-thin and treacherous. We want the freedom to watch what we want, but when situations like the Columbine killings occur, we turn toward the media with angry, pointing fingers and a million questions. Parents run out to purchase TVs equipped with V-chips to protect the innocent minds of their children.

To get more insight on the subject, I checked the Center for Media Literacy Web site, at www.medialit.org. It made a good point in analyzing the questions we ask, instead of the questions we should ask, with the following:

“The never-ending debate about media violence has been fueled by one unanswerable question: ‘Does watching violence cause someone to become violent?’ The reason we’ve gotten nowhere on this issue for 40 years is because this is the wrong question to ask about violence in the media.”

The real question should be: “What is the long-term impact on our national psyche when millions of children, in their formative years, grow up decade after decade bombarded with very powerful visual and verbal messages demonstrating violence as the preferred way to solve problems and normalizing fear and violence as ‘the way things are?'”

We forget these things are cumulative. It goes further than a kid having a nightmare from watching some gore. What happens when you have millions of barely-supervised children, watching cinematic murders every day, over a period of decades? What happens when all of those children together form a whole society?

But these questions infer a leaning toward one of our generation’s greatest enemies. We’re drowning in our violence, but the last life-vest we want to save us is censorship.

I refuse to buy CDs at Wal-Mart, because I don’t believe in paying for music with altered or censored content. Seeing a blurred body part when an R-rated movie is changed for TV is rather irritating, if not insulting. I don’t like corporations choosing what I see and hear.

On the other hand, I don’t want to worry that some little punk in a trenchcoat is going to blow someone’s brains out because he grew up sucking down violence with his Kool-Aid.

I really don’t want to be infatuated with gruesome details and images. But I am, and it seems that all of us are. It’s scary to think this just could be part of the human condition.

The CML Web site made another point that can’t be ignored. It states “overcrowding, pervasive life-long poverty, hunger, joblessness and drug addiction — as well as the ready availability of guns — also contribute to our skyrocketing homicide rate.”

The media is obviously not the only enemy, if we can really say it’s an enemy at all.

So what’s the solution? Judging by the direction of the media, the censors are fighting a losing battle. If we demand violence, then violence is what we’ll get. It seems the only answers lie in individuals, if we can muster up the self-discipline to avert our minds from violence and death.

Who knows if less exposure would make a difference. It’s an issue that media experts debate until they’re blue in the face. What can we do?

Your guess is as good as mine.