Sick of it
- Alex
Everyone close your eyes and imagine a situation with me, will you?
You've got a son who's over in Iraq on his own, independent of the Shrub Occupation. You've been in contact with him, but suddenly lose
contact. Eventually the Pentagon (or whoever) calls you and says he's been captured by militants and executed. Can you imagine the shock,
the anguish, the sadness? I can't, not really. I've known friends and family who've died, but not like that.
Imagine it's some days later, and all of a sudden the press corps and camera crews arrive at your house. They tell you that the militants have
released a video to the internet showing the decapitation of your son. They ask you how this makes you feel, hoping for a tearful soundbyte for
the 6 o'clock news, while photojournalists take invasive pictures of you breaking down with your family on the lawn under the unexpected burden of
this news, delivered to you more or less mercilessly by someone you've never met. By that night, your face is plastered all over the world via
the news services. No matter how sympathetic your story is to people, perhaps you'd like at least a little family privacy, wouldn't you?
Wouldn't you hope that a crew would call first to give you time to decide whether or not you'd like to talk? Wouldn't you hope that the government
would help you out so that you wouldn't lose so much of your privacy?
Imagine that the President decides to instead incorporate this into his entire program of pre-emptive militarism. A program that your son wasn't
even a part of. He uses the public outcry to try and rally support for his own cause, vowing to catch and prosecute those responsible. Imagine
hoping that those folks aren't hiding out with Omar Ben Laden, and those responsible for killings in Fallujah, because the track record for "catching"
just isn't there, is it?
Now imagine that it's even a few days later. You read anecdotally that servers on the internet that have made the video available are crashing
due to the intense demands of people who actually want to watch the grisly thing. You hear that some screwed up teenagers have taken images of
the decapitated head and are putting it up on websites with thought bubbles coming out of it. How would it make you feel to know that so many of
your countrymen are using this sad situation so voyeuristically? That people are overcome with the desire to actually see this atrocity
take place, and then use it as a joke? Can you even imagine it?
Yeah, me neither. Thank God we don't live in a society like that.
Oh.
I'd like to say I can't believe how depraved this country has been over this poor man. But I can believe it. Call me jaded if you must,
but I'm just not seeing a lot of responsibility from our media, and television in general. And I don't know what to do about it. I just hope
I don't have to someday imagine what it would be like to have any privacy at all.
What do you think? Drop us a line at webmaster@simpleprop.com and give us some
feedback. Maybe we'll even run your letters in future Gambits. 'The Daily Gambit' is updated every weekday.
