Hard to Hide

I keep thinking of a TV documentary I saw during the weekend. It showed photos of US soldiers in Afghanistan, posing one to three at a time, kneeling behind their “kills” as if the “kills” were deer or game animals.

There are many similar photos available on the Internet to which I could establish links for you, but I know that you know already.

I realize that everyone knows about such things, but we still manage to go on with our lives.

I go on with my own life. But the hiding from them, the justifications of them, the acceptance of them, the suppression of the people who make such statements, and then the moving on as if nothing had happened, bothers me as much as the killers and the killed. It creates a self-perpetuating circle.

There is also some way in which such photos do stop us, inside. Our subconscious minds pick up everything and never let it go. There is, on that level, no hiding.

The almost inconceivable cruelties all around us just have to have a deadening effect on us despite our “moving on.”

We do whatever we think we can to stop them despite what seems like the futility of even trying. My own view is that the most effective action to take is to bear witness, privately and publicly, to the atrocities.