This issue has me nonplussed. What do people want to see the photos of a dead person for? Seriously? No matter what would be released, there are many who would say it's fabricated or photoshopped and they would be right.
We live in a very sick world. The Bin Ladens of the world were sick monsters because they did not value human life. In an eager race to see a corpse, those Americans and others who relish in his death find themselves one step closer to Bin Laden's sick mind set than they would ever care to admit. Yes, the world is a messed up place where people regularly visit sites that feature horrible imagery. Sites like Drudge Report make millions off of aggregating news and appealing to the lowest common denominator. Then we have Hannity on Fox News making some big deal about the photos and espousing the eye for an eye barbarism. What? After ten years you would think that the lesson of operation infinite justice, which begain in November of 2001, would have been learned.
We regularly get the Alexa reports to see what various nations are doing what and to keep a pulse on web traffic and basically, one can't go through those reams of data and not get depressed. It would be easy for me to point to the web itself as a medium for lowering the moral standards of the nation, but the truth is it's more complex than that. The web itself is an aggregate of cultural elements from video games to youtube videos. The emphasis on 'common' now really has been added to the lowest common denominator and this is what is now influencing larger and larger groups that before would have been isolated from these things.
Bin Laden is dead. No need to celebrate it. No need to embrace revenge - like the Koran itself does. An eye for an eye isn't what this was about, despite all the rhetoric to the contrary. This was about "asymmetrical threat elimination" as former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld might call it. When we took out Saddam, we did it for the same reason. It wasn't about revenge.
Revenge is stupid. It is. Why that person killed some people - let's kill him! That's not justice. That mindset fosters a society that slowly slides into the killer mindset. The video games, comic books, sick websites and all the rest pave the way for the west's next generations to become what they abhor - sick individuals who revel in violence and are numb to the worst forms of depravity.
No comments:
Post a Comment
All comments are moderated. Civil discourse is invited, however profanity, insults and advertising are prohibited. Thank you for your contribution. Your post will appear after a moderator has reviewed it.