As I sat and watched the self recorded videos of the remaining rebels in Aleppo these past two days, I can’t help but lend these fellow humans my ears and my eyes and my time. Pondering what I would do in a situation where I am fighting for my freedom while a tyrannical government that has in the past used chemical weapons on it’s own civilians closes in on the last ruins and bodies in the city that represented my liberty. I feel a deep sorrow as the words “goodbye”, “help us”, “no place left to go”, “we’re dying” resonate with me. Then I close down my Facebook app or my News app and go on with my day.
Yes, those chilling videos linger in my thoughts but I am detached. I witness and empathize with the victims of what some call a genocide, then I detach. I may laugh the very next moment at a joke by one of my students, or check the latest sports commentary on my Bleacher Report app, or raise an eyebrow at the the world going crazy over the great Trump and Kanye meeting. Nonetheless I detach. And so do many of us. We live in an eerie world.
What else can the average person do? That isn’t the right question. We watch these videos of the Aleppo rebels, of unarmed black and brown bodies getting shot down by police, of intense violence on human life and even animal life and few of us understand how these videos affect or psyche or question the normalization of watching these distressing moving images.
For those who are not familiar with the Netflix show Black Mirror, it is the modern day version of Twilight Zone, highlighting the disturbing and fantastic relationship between modern technology and the way we interact with the world around us. Each season is an anthology of short films set in a disturbing world in the not so distant future. Except now I wonder if some of those stories can’t be placed in our present or in the world that we live in. Art imitates life, not the other way around. I find myself in a jarring state of awe at our precarious world and how present technology has increasingly entrenched itself in our lives, intrinsically altering the ways that humans experience life. I listen to the deafening silence by the United Nations and the rest of the world on Aleppo. The begrudged involvement just this morning.
The recorded image has shed light on our formerly isolated world. Watching the events at Tienanmen Square exposed an oppressive Chinese government. When the world saw the horrific nature of race relations in the 60’s (I could have said the 2010’s too), the Civil Rights Movement gained international notoriety and America had to deal with race. When the Soviet Union exposed the first Nazi concentration camps and the images of emaciated and beaten Jews, the Holocaust came to light and the globe was forced to confront the evils of man. I could go on.
Gil Scott Heron was wrong, the revolution was, will be and is televised. We just tune in for a few minutes at a time, maybe confront it when it is convenient, then detach.
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