As I was perusing today's online edition of the New York Times, I skimmed over the main headlines as I usually do: "Yankees and Sabathia Near a Deal" ... "Obama Calls for Governor Under Siege to Step Down" ... "U.S. Forces Kill 6 Afghan Police Officers By Mistake" ... "Best Bets in Cameras, Under $300" ...
Wait a second. Rewind.
"U.S. Forces Kill 6 Afghan Police Officers By Mistake"
That sounds like kind of a big deal. My country was responsible for the deaths of six innocent Afghanis. Today. So why the hell did I just skip over that headline? How many other similar headlines have I skipped over the past five or six years? Why did I do that? And is this normal? Are most other Americans just as guilty of this as I am? Sadly, I think the answer to that last question is -- Yes.
I was and am appalled at myself for doing this -- for so haphazardly skipping over such a news story as disgusting and angering as that one. So I began to analyze why exactly I did such a thing, and I found myself unable to do so without the philosophies of both Sartre and Beauvoir coming to mind. With regard to Sartre -- it seems to me that we as Americans have been conditioned all of our lives to reduce those involved in such tragedies to their mere facticity. With regard to Beauvoir -- we've clearly been conditioned to even more so disregard the "enemy" as the Other. It wasn't until soldiers in Vietnam began coming home and telling the horrifying stories of napalm usage and until video footage surfaced of the atrocities taking place, that the public really began to become outraged at what was happening. The same is true today regarding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those aren't real life men and women dying needlessly every day - they're "soldiers" or "Iraqis" or "Vietnamese". Unless we have a loved one or friend over there in harm's way, the reality of what is really going on doesn't really register unless we actually stop and think about it.
Imagine for a second if our high school textbooks didn't say that "58,000+ Americans were killed as a result of the Vietnam War" but rather "58,000+ real live men and women with hearts and souls and mothers, fathers, children, husbands, and wives were killed in the Vietnam War". See, now I think that would really cause students to stop and think a little more; to not reduce these people to their facticity; and to realize and have great concern for what types of actions our government is involved in.
Similarly, if that New York Times headline instead read "U.S. Forces Kill 6 Human Beings by Mistake", I probably wouldn't have so nonchalantly skimmed over it. But the mass media conditions us to do just that. Hell, this wasn't even one of the main headlines. I may be crazy, but I think this should be a big deal. Our government mistakenly murdered six people. Six people. But the powers-that-be lead us to believe that our government mistakenly murdered six police officers, or six Afghans, or six soldiers. Whether it be the various media sources or our elected officials, I think that the bottom line is that our society conditions us to see those directly impacted by our overseas involvements in terms of their facticity, and not in their transcendent qualities.
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2 comments:
I love this post. I completely agree that we are conditioned to see people as their facticity and not as who they truly are. But I also think that's kind of the goal of the military. They boast slogans of being a part of a group, a family, being united. And while fighting, everyone is just a soldier. They lose their names and their stories and where they came from. And then when they die and we read it in the paper, it doesn't effect us it's just a facticity, a body, leaving the earth. But what about those people's children, and parents and sisters? It also goes back to the theory of "the they", which is one who loses themselves, and who they are, to become a part of a group.
But in such a huge, globalized world, how can we turn things around and treat people as their transcendence instead of just their facticity?
If we can't call them soldiers or casualties or whatnot, what are we supposed to call them? We can't refer to 50000 somedd people by name. Our language requires a certain acceptance of authenticity (bad faith). I mean, Heidegger says we all live in everydayness most of the time and theres no escaping it.
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