Shrugging our shoulders to those of the past
By Adam Holmberg
New Perspectives, IV Leader Columnist, Oct. 2, 2003
We were short-handed in the Bookstore this Sept. 11, and I was manning the cash register. One of the customers we had that day paid by check; she asked me the date.
Her friend, standing next to her, reflected the incredulity in my mind; while I maintained my poker face, her friend insisted “It’s been on the radio all day. It’s Sept. 11. Didn’t you know that?” Over two thousand people died two years prior in the first attack on American soil since the War of 1812, and all this young woman could manage was a shrug.
The indifference this student showed to history didn’t exactly surprise me, but I was disturbed by the lack of concern for others. There has been a definite trend in the past 50 years to move away from religion and religious thought in the United States, and I think a problem with that is the compassion and concern for others the Christian faith tends to preach have gone the way of disco.
We have reduced human suffering to sound bytes. We can send Americans — real living people — to go and kill faceless, nameless Iraqis because our news censors any image too disturbing for our after-dinner consumption. Instead, we think of war in terms of Saving Private Ryan — sure it’s hell, but we’re fighting these evil SOBs and we don’t have a draft on, so why worry? War has become a video game or a grainy digital picture on a movie screen roaring in Dolby surround.
How this has happened can be explained very simply: we haven’t just embraced technology — we’ve sold our soul to it. The Matrix is fascinating to us because it depicts a world where normal people — you and I — are plugged into machines. In reality, our world is a myth controlled by these machines. The secret to the Wachowski’s success — and I don’t think they even realize this — is that millions of people haven’t bought the DVD because they’re afraid the movie will become reality. The Matrix is so successful a movie because it has already happened. We create entire worlds in a computer and allow those worlds to become more real to us than our own.
What image do we see that isn’t digitally altered in some way? Photoshop is a wonderful, frighteningly powerful tool of reality manipulation — more powerful than we give it credit for. CGI can take us to that galaxy far, far away or to Middle-Earth with its Hobbits or to 18th century London, and we blissfully buy into the computer-generated reality.
With computers, you can remove someone’s very existence with a few clicks and some manipulation of the background where they stood. Delete a few lines of text and a person’s history will vanish without a trace. In the past, to remove someone from history itself took time, effort, and a lot of expense. Today, a disgruntled hacker could do it in a few thousand keystrokes and if someone forgot to put what they erased back… It might take a hundred years, but when someone dies and all the people they knew have died, what remains of that person except the record of them?
As a nation we’ve surrendered our humanity. In July the leaders of our nation found and killed the two sons of Saddam Hussein. To “prove their deaths” we broadcast images of the bodies of these two men whose country we illegally seized to the four corners of the world. Saddam Hussein and his sons were evil men — I have no argument there — but it is immoral and barbaric that we would display them in living color on national television as trophies, and is there a person who doubts that is the only true reason we allowed our media to photograph them from every angle.
In the beautiful U2 song “Peace On Earth” Bono sings, “You become the monster / So the monster will not break you.” Because of our president and his administration, we became another monster — the monster without humanity who must make trophies of its enemy’s sons. Was that worth “proving” that these men died? Was that worth another gold star on our kill board?
It’s no better when a car load of teenagers crashes and burns, and we spend a lot of time and newsprint telling everyone what good people they were, never mind that they died because they were so loaded with booze and drugs that they didn’t see the tree or the ditch or the barrier or the other car in front of them.
Perhaps we should not condemn them (unless the person intoxicated kills someone who was not), but we should condemn what they were doing. True humanity does not ignoring suffering — and an addict suffers — but stares it straight in the face. Not only can we help them — if they will let us — but we might discourage others from starting. In any case, we will gain nothing from pretending that the addict is not wrong for being addicted and that the intoxication is any less our enemy than Osama bin Laden. Both strike at our hearts, taking good people from us needlessly, and both must be conquered for us to ever be truly free.
The one question I hope you ask yourselves is very simple: how do we learn to feel again when everything around us is doctored and spun to elicit a programmed response?
Perhaps I sometimes judge people too harshly.
But at least I remember those buildings falling, and the people inside them jumping to their deaths instead of burning to death, and I want to cry for those people who never saw their loved ones again.
And I remember that there is one young woman who didn’t even shed a tear for those people.
And I realize how lucky I am to still feel anything at all.