Opening Day Fever
By Gregory J. Rummo (04/11/04)
DID YOU FEEL it on Saturday around 8:00 a.m.? There was a disturbance in the force that propagated through the region. Most men, some boys and even a few brave women were suddenly overcome with the irresistible urge to don rubber boots and stand waist deep in raging, ice cold streams.
Images have a way of making a point that words alone cannot convey. They can sway public opinion better than the choicest words written by the most eloquent of columnists. They allow gigabytes of information to pour into our minds unaccompanied by the clutter of commentary.
No longer is anything left to the imagination. Even the vocabulary-challenged reader cannot plead ignorance. It’s all there in front of him. The horror is inescapable. He has no place to run and hide from his thoughts.
Whether it’s video footage of nature in all its fury—a powerful Great Plains twister for example—or the Pulitzer Prize winning photo showing the execution of a Viet Cong guerrilla in 1968 that helped change public sentiment against the Vietnam war.
We stand in awe watching… and listening… as a farm house explodes from a tornado’s pressure gradient and before our eyes in real time a family loses every material possession it ever owned.
The back of another human being’s skull is blown off at point-blank range creating a cascade of blood pooling on the ground around his twitching corpse and the hair on the back of our head bristles.
Horror—real horror—makes all of us uncomfortable.
And so I wonder if things might be different in this country—in the courts and in newsrooms and in schools and even in our homes—if we weren’t all privy to a little more of that real-time horror on a regular basis.
Suppose there were actual video footage of Susan Smith driving her two children into that North Carolina lake as they were strapped into the back seat of the car in their “child safety seats.” Might there have been less chatter about her mental condition at the time of the murders?
Or what about thirty minutes worth of Andrea Yates systematically drowning all five of her children in a bathtub in her own home? Just the thought of it turns my stomach. Imagine having to sit through a half hour in prime time?
How about watching as a man rapes and murders a 5-year old girl? Does anyone think there’d be much clamor for leniency in sentencing?
What about the 44 million abortions in America since Roe v. Wade became the law of the land in 1973?
We’ve heard this ever-growing statistic so many times it has become a meaningless number. Comparisons to “half a generation of thirty-year olds and under,” or to the “populations of entire countries” have failed to move public sentiment beyond what studies indicate is an issue that evenly divides us.
But if we could see the legs of a kicking baby being severed in front of our eyes or the back of a head punched open by a pair of scissors and the brains sucked out by a stainless steel catheter, collapsing the skull in the process, might Americans be less divided?
King David wrote in the Old Testament, “Because of the voice of the enemy, because of the oppression of the wicked…horror has overwhelmed me.”
Horror overwhelmed us in Fallujah. But those monsters are in good company. The only difference was that their atrocities were captured on camera for the whole world to see, leaving nothing to our imagination.
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