How can I be making my children spaghetti bolognese at exactly the same time as other parents are picking the bodies of their children from out of a bomb crater?

Posted by: winslie | November 20, 2012

How can I be making my children spaghetti bolognese at exactly the same time as other parents are picking the bodies of their children from out of a bomb crater?

From an article by Giles Fraser for the Guardian.

Do pictures of children killed in Gaza force us to face a gruesome reality?

Images of dead children are hard to look at and even harder to talk about, but can they challenge us to act on our anger?

So, Giles. What are you doing about all of this? That is what these photographs say to me. I make it personal because it is experienced as personal, as a direct challenge. And silence is just a fancy mechanism of avoidance, which in extreme forms can be a subtle form of complicity. These images call me out of my ordinary day – but to God knows what. Do they amplify an instinct for revenge or an instinct for making peace? As Susan Sontag has noted in her little book Regarding the Pain of Others, photographs of atrocities can produce opposing reactions in their audience. Indeed, part of the problem with the plain and simple images of dead children lying in the morgue is that they do not set these deaths in any wider narrative context. And that allows the viewer to read into them his or her own view of the world, and then cranks up the emotional volume as high as it will go.

The danger is that one is left marooned in one’s own anger when the real challenge is to find some way forward – both emotionally and politically.

Please please [read in full ]

Israelis vs. Africans [Goldstein Dawn] ~ Must See Video by David Sheen

When you see a person suffer and you feel no pain