We do not live in a world that treats all life equally. Not even close. Human beings inevitably feel certain tragedies more deeply, based on proximity to the victims, national identity, the circumstances of death and so on.
It is not surprising that there has been so much media attention paid to the horrible massacre in Newtown, Connecticut. The thought of small children being gunned down in a classroom is shocking and tragic. And the usual suggestions to avoid “politicizing” a tragedy by talking about public policy decisions that might prevent future tragedies seem to have less resonance this time around.
When we draw comparisons between a particular event and other similar tragedies, it is not to say that they all matter equally, but to remind ourselves that we’re conditioned to feel that some matter quite a bit more than others.
When I heard the news about Newtown, I thought of previous mass shootings in this country. That is perhaps a natural reaction.
But then I also thought about the case of Sgt. Robert Bales. He is accused of massacring 16 Afghan civilians earlier this year, nine of them children. It is not the only atrocity of the Afghan War, but the accounts of the attack are particularly horrifying. Bales allegedly left his base and entered the villages of Balandi and Alkozai, near Kandahar. He proceeded to kill the victims as they slept, and then burned some of their bodies.
It is not that U.S. media failed to cover the atrocity. But the tone of the coverage placed considerable weight on the damage these deaths would do to the war effort (FAIR Media Advisory, 3/12/12). Questions were posed like, “Could this reignite a new anti-American backlash in the unstable region?” One headline stated, “Killings Threaten Afghan Mission.” USA Today actually had on its front page, “Patriot Now Stands Accused in Massacre.”
Seeing the atrocity this way prioritizes issues like national security–and obscures the fact that children were killed in their sleep, and that the person alleged to have killed them was a member of our military. This particular incident is, in some ways, just a more horrifying version of many other U.S. attacks that killed children in Afghanistan, or the drone attacks that have killed hundreds in Pakistan.
It is understandable, on some level, that these deaths will not affect most Americans the same way as the deaths in Newtown. They are deaths in a poor, violent country most of us will never see.
But that should not prevent us from asking ourselves–and our media–why that is, and wondering what our politics and our culture might look like if media decision-makers felt that that stories like this deserved more attention.
One has to imagine that our world would be different if we treated every tragic death as if it mattered. U.S. media shy away from imagery that could be considered too explicit or graphic–especially when it calls attention to suffering caused or endured by U.S. forces. As journalist Amy Goodman has said on countless occasions, if our media showed the brutal consequences of U.S. warmaking, those policies would change.
Sometimes these discussions can be quite explicit. Time‘s Joe Klein’s comment that four-year-olds in Pakistan might have to die from drone attacks so that four-year-old Americans do not die in terrorist attacks was a reminder that, for some people, some lives are practically expendable.
So what would a healthier media look like? It wouldn’t tell us not to grieve over Newtown. It would tell us that violence against children is deplorable no matter where it happens, or who inflicts it–and that there are things we can do to stop it, both close to home and many miles away.
The sins of empire are committed in our names
And with our monies.
That we can ignore our responsibility for them is both a tribute to our manipulation by those in power, and the press that serves them
And to our own failure of humanity.
I’d like to think that Goodman is correct, that brought face to face with the horrors we have wrought, we would seek to end them
But I am far from sanguine in that musing.
A very brave post. All of America should be painfully aware of what their government does and the consequences thereof. Only then will pressure come to bear. An effective independent, objective media is a great thing to work towards.
Thank you.. Thoughtfully said.
Wow, thank you. Hope millions of others read these important words. Went back to pick up again a poem by Mary Oliver, “Of The Empire”, in her “Red Bird” poems (2008) in which she wonders how we will be known… “as a culture that spoke little if at all about the quality of life for people (other people)…”that they will say also that our politics was no more than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of the heart, and that the heart, in those days, was small, and hard, and full of meanness”. Also, a Perfect comment by Doug Latimer.
Thank you for the kind words, Katy.
Believe me, I need all the serotonin hits I can get.
Mr. Hart, I am glad to read that civilization and empathy has not died in this “age of terror,” that questions such as yours can be posed and meditated upon.
Very similar, if not identical, feelings came to mind when I saw the MSM’S massive, non-stop coverage of the Newtown massacre. Don’t old men, women and children living in some remote village massacred by drones falling from the sky without warning deserve our tears and outrage as well? Are we so atavistically tribalist in our perceptions that we have no feeling left for “other?” I am aware that evolution embedded in our simian brains–for the sake of group and/or species survival–a strong tribal and territorial impulse. This impulse, governments know too well, can be _conditioned_ for better or for worse, from “be-true-to-your-school” admonitions to NFL/MLB/NBA following to jingoistic loyalty to culture, its symbols and hierarchs. But lest we sink into sociopathic pack behavior and “the-devil-made-me-do-it or just following orders “determinism,” we must remind ourselves we also possess a frontal lobe and a lesser gravitational sense of universal loyalty to other sentient beings and the universe which produces us all.
This sense, as conscience, also makes its appeal to us as individuals. I suspect this lingering self-awareness can lead to the beginnings of authentic choice. And that is to empathize with all humans regardless of their tribe, geographic residence or culture.
Be well.
Blog,network,do anything to stop this murderous war machine from
killing human beings,us and our babies world wide.It is time that the
world knows that the American people are resolved in our efforts to bring peace to the world and not world war III….And let the world know
we love humanity here and aboard.Stop the violence………..
By omitting one essential fact, I think this article misses the most important point: the mass murderer in Connecticut was undoubtedly a profoundly mentally ill sociopath, but the slaughter of innocents, including children, in the “war on terror” is a “rational choice” made by policymakers at the highest levels in the U.S. Because of this, the political and media establishment CAN NOT treat all child deaths equally, because U.S. policy INCLUDES accepting child murder as unfortunate, but acceptable, “collateral damage”. Perhaps the GI who committed these atrocities was also deranged, but U.S. policy in these “war on terrorism” locations is a cold, calculated, product of “rational” minds. According to the NY Times, President Obama, who has elevated the use of drones to a strategy, PERSONALLY orders most, if not all, of the CIA drone strikes that have killed at least 60+ innocent children, and hundreds of other innocents, even though he is well aware that these strikes DO, AND INEVITABLY WILL, include the death of innocent children and others. Sgt Bales may have gone insane, but he went insane in an environment where official policy reins death and destruction down on innocents as a matter of course every day.
For years people would respond to my concerns about the horrible deaths of children by American hands with questioning glances, as if I had spoken of something they had never heard before, or perhaps I was merely engaging in hyperbole. Anyway, no tears were forthcoming.
So, when the insensitivity of America strikes at home and, at last, the pent up tears flow like a dam had broken, I find that emotional displays are now suddenly in vogue.
I don’t know any of the people that are suffering this latest tragedy in Connecticut, nor do I know any of the people that are suffering daily tragedies of this type in the five countries Obama is now at war with, but I do know the sorrow they now must feel. Maybe someone needs to tell America that the people our government kills are human, too.
Lt. Calley’s defense for the killings at My Lai was that no one told him the Vietnamese were human. It was so easy a mistake to make, judged our government, so Calley was pardoned.
Sometimes it is too difficult for Americans to look at people and, just by appearances, determine that they are indeed human and deserve to live, without having that message hammered home incessantly hour after hour for days on end by the Corporate Info-masters of America.
Thank you Peter Hart and commenters too. Responding to a friend’s snide comment on a photo of President Obama wiping a tear, I wished that he would show the same emotion for the children killed by his drones. Your article is a much more eloquent statement of the sentiment.
Doug Latimer, your comment hammered me. During a conversation with an acquaintance that I bumped into at a bar a couple of weeks ago, I ranted about the horrendous record of Iraqi deaths and other damage as a consequence of our invasion. His “I don’t care about Iraqis” stunned me. Hope he is in an exceptionally small minority.
Exactly what I was thinking.
PhDRadical, I sadly don’t think that he is.
I don’t believe it’s solely due to an antipathy toward “the other”, but there is a moral indifference that permeates our culture when it comes to the crimes committed in our name.
Again, the pervasiveness of propaganda can account to some degree for the prevalence of that attitude
But there is an element of willfulness to it that is derived from a sense of American exceptionalism, racism and a belief in the righteousness of our dominion over other peoples.
That profile is part and parcel of the imperial mindset, and is propagated in order to persuade the populace that their interests coincide with those of the oppressors, both of the peoples of foreign lands
And our own.
That’s my take, at any rate.
How refreshing it is to find so many things that I have been thinking in the comments by Doug and others. The pain and heartbreak of loss of any loved one bring forth the same emotions no matter what nationality, ethnicity or religion. We see it in films of the mourners worldwide. Agony is agony and all blood runs the same color of red.
As a nation, we can do better. As a nation and as a people, we MUST do better. Right now I’m deeply ashamed of my government.
Peter – Thank you. I had similar thoughts about the children dying in war, but wasn’t finding the right words to express them. These are powerful reflections – if only more people could hear them, as Amy says…
Unfortunately, this has always been the case. I expect that the troll will be along soon enough to declare that this is just an isolated example of one soldier gone berserk, and that we always try mightily to avoid the deaths of innocents. We don’t, and our culture is extraordinarily violent-minded and often primitive and backward. That’s why we have the routine wars, the crazy gun violence, the massive gulf beteen the haves and the have-nots, and the insane and indigent treated like rabid dogs or simply ignored. Give it about three months; this horror will be visited upon us again, after the tempest of denial and outrage has subsided. It will probably be another lone lunatic wiping out a diner, or a mall, or his place of work. But it will happen again. It’s happening now, over and over, in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen. We’re number one!
Right on Mr. Hart. Well stated.
I fear that until the media becomes more fair and accurate and less provocative and commercial, we will be stuck in this ever eroding and declining perspective on such things.
I live outside the country and see the local new here as very insular in annoying ways, but it is still miles away from the US press that does not even bother to listen to the stories of those our government is attacking. I wish the US press would focus on the acts we are morally responsible for and stop obsessing over the wrongs of others we cannot control.
The killings in Newtown CT were truly a tragedy of epic proportions and the television coverage was very painful to watch.
But I can’t help wondering how television viewers here might react if when other children are killed by drone attacks in Pakistan, Yemen, or Gaza, television viewers were also able to see photographs of the child killed and his/her suffering parents along with a description of the child’s hopes and dreams. Might we, as Americans, begin to see that all of these killings are also deeply felt tragedies instead of mere anonymous statistics or just collateral damage?
The senseless killing of children anywhere is also a tragedy.
Ok to all morons who seem to be tying American policy to a mass murder er in our army ,who used his position to kill-lets all take a step back.Both these freaks were mass killers who entered gun free zones to kill.Wish in both cases armed guards were there.