This morning...

[lithera]

Wheeee! So hard to get out of bed. I wish it were for reasons other than I'm just tired in the morning. Rar.

So Inari-sama has posted something thoughtful. Even if it does remind me of Angel last night. Spike does get all of the best lines. "Well, you got your fire hell, your ice hell.... ice hell... upside down hell..."

Apparently the woman who took that photo I posted yesterday lost her job because of it. That's a damned shame. It's not right. I wouldn't want photos like that to become common place but they should be available. If they were common place, they'd lose some of their impact and that would also be a shame. (Thanks for pointing this out gamethyme.)

Rar rar work.

Comments

[givemethewhip.livejournal.com]

Oh, come on. That's just not true. I mean, I'm sure that there are a few people at the Pentagon or elsewhere who might take that view, but the policy is not intended to make people forget that American soldiers are dying. If you really think that the Pentagon or DOD want the American public to forget that soldiers are dying in combat, then you don't understand the Pentagon or the way that military brass feels about their troops. If you really think that people will forget that Americans are dying just because they don't see coffins on an airplane, then you give the American public too little credit.

And while I don't work for DOD, I do work as a consular officer, and I can tell you from personal experience that bereaved families take to heart all sorts of things that non-bereaved citizens consider to be innocuous. (E.g. Passport cancellation policy changed so that holes are now punched in the passport instead of a 'cancelled' stamp being placed on the pages when an American dies overseas, since a grieving relative of a Pan Am 101 victim said that the stamp made it look like the government had 'cancelled out [his relative's] life.' Nevertheless, I had a grieving relative complain to me that one of the holes I punched in a deceased American's passport went through the edge of the picture, and I had therefore not shown proper respect. When people are grieving, they react very differently to things than you or I might.)

You may say that a picture of coffins in a cargo plane is not, as an image alone, offensive, and that the meaning of the image serves a purpose: to remind people of the cost of war. But a bereaved family member may look at that as 'my son, packaged up like a bale of hay and shipped back in the cargo hold.' Bereaved families don't need to be reminded that there's a cost to war. They already know that, intimately, and they may very well be hurt by what they see as a callous display of their loved ones' remains.

I know that the photographer's intent was to show just the opposite -- at least that's what she says. I recognize that the death toll of the war is immensely newsworthy, and that people need to recognize the cost in human lives. But I also know that bereaved families are very sensitive to things that turn the death of their particular soldiers -- something that is to them a very private event -- into a media frenzy, a public relations issue or a political point.

Is it really any better to ignore that, and to print the photo -- which some people would say is a political statement in the form of a reminder that soldiers are dying -- than it is to heed that and not print the photo -- which some people would say is a political statement to try to make people forget that soldiers are dying?

In one way, you can say that yes it is better to ignore the possible hurt to the families of the soldiers, because news is news, and we all have a right to see it. But there are other ways to get the same news across, and to do it just as poignantly and effectively, but with more respect for the feelings of the families.

Granted, some families might prefer to have the coffins on the news, since some of them feel as though Americans are uncaring that their loved ones are dying. There's no one answer, so DOD has got to try to do the best it can, and prefers a policy that tries to minimize the potential for gratuitous emotional distress for the largest number of families.

Gratuitous emotional distress can be provided to Average Joe American in lots of other ways, to make the same point -- dying solders -- that the coffins would make.