Death In the Browser Tab

theodp writes: "There you are watching another death on video," writes the NY Times' Teju Cole. "In the course of ordinary life — at lunch or in bed, in a car or in the park — you are suddenly plunged into someone else's crisis, someone else's horror. It arrives, absurdly, in the midst of banal things. That is how, late one afternoon in April, I watched Walter Scott die. The footage of his death, taken by a passer-by, had just been published online on the front page of The New York Times. I watched it, sitting at my desk in Brooklyn, and was stunned by it." Cole continues, "For most of human history, to see someone die, you had to be there. Depictions of death, if there were any, came later, at a certain remove of time and space." Disturbing as they may be (Cole notes he couldn't bear to watch the ISIS beheading videos), such images may ultimately change things for the better. Is it better to publish them than sweep them under the carpet?

Comments

No comparison

[Kargan]

Other than the fact that they are both depicting the end of a human life, I don't think there's any comparison between airing beheadings done by terrorists and a US citizen being shot in the back by a police officer.

Airing the former on the world stage only aids the terrorists' cause, the latter allows us to see something we SHOULD see, which is how police in this country comport themselves when they think no one is looking.

Death is immanent, if not imminent

[argStyopa]

On the other hand, in pre-modern eras (as well, sadly, for much of the 3rd-4th-world today) death was everywhere.
Most people lived/worked on farms, where animals were killed more or less in front of you, for you to eat that night, or later. Every family lost children, with medieval death rates for 2 yr olds reaching 50%, mostly to drowning. The slightest injury could easily (and more or less quickly) be lethal through infection, while waves of typhus and other communicable diseases were almost a constant fear.

I think what the author meant to say is that our little niche of modernity when we were safe from most random environmental deaths, yet insulated and never actually confronted by death, may have ended.

Re:I for one

[Anonymous Coward]

If sticking your head in the sand is what you want to do, then by all means. Doesn't mean that bad shit doesn't happen though, and if you're a citizen of a country whose military goes off and does these things, you have a right and a responsibility to know what's being done in your name.

Actually what's worse than remaining ignorant is responding to imagery of dead people with outrage for the people who presented you with the information. In a normal world, with a public that has its collective head screwed on straight, the reaction to the July 12, 2007 Baghdad air strike would have been disgust in the military, not disgust with the person who brought the atrocity to light. But no, Chelsea Manning took the fall for it instead.

NO, it is not enough!

[duckintheface]

"Hearing 'White cop kills yet another unarmed black man' is enough."

Absolutely not. Cops have been killing unarmed black men for a long, long time. It is only now, when video is frequently available and the media has decided to pursue the matter, that we see a national awakening to the problem. It is hard for most Americans to imagine what it's like to be a young black man living under the control of a brutal police force. We all want to believe that the police are there to protect and serve. It is only when we can see the evil with our own eyes that it becomes real and becomes intolerable.