I wrote this a year ago: still applies today. Today’s random thought: why does the media hide war and violence from us?

The thought occurred to me this morning that in America, we don’t see real violence. We don’t see real war. We don’t see real murder. We don’t see the results of a DUI where innocents are killed and/or maimed. We don’t see people getting shot or stabbed to death. We don’t, for example, see the bodies of children blown apart by Russian missiles/bombs. We live in a pixilated reality.

Why?

The irony of all of this is we’re regaled with the FAKE, FICTIONAL variety of those acts all the time. But when we see it in a movie or the odd TV show, we don’t react nearly as much as we would if we saw the real thing because our conscious mind is typically able to separate the fictional from the real.

For example, right now in Iran, the government of that country routinely arrests, murders and sexually assaults women who refuse/protest against their idiotic hajib rules. As many as 1200 girls were recently poisoned in schools over this issue. THERE female oppression is VERY real.

But we don’t see it. We’re not allowed to see it. Because what the media shows us are vague, pixilated shots that could be anything but which only vaguely resembles the outline of what could be a human being.

We don’t see actual mangled bodies. We don’t see people blown to pieces. We don’t see torture victims. We’re left to imagine it if we believe it’s happened at all.

Why is that? Who made the decision that we can’t be “offended” by reality?

Another example is gun shots. Media plays word games: In real life, someone shot but not killed is “wounded,” not “injured.”

Athletes get “injured.” Since when was the decision made to expand the word “injured” to cover bullet or other wounds inflicted as a result of war or crimes?

Many reading this have never noticed these nuanced uses of words. Few seeing these pixilated images that force us to take the narrator’s word for it as opposed to making our own judgments by using our own eyes (After all, didn’t someone at some point say that “a picture is worth a 1000 words?”) to see for ourselves, even realize it.

I believe that these decisions have become policy to keep us from becoming inflamed with true outrage.

What would America’s attitude towards those pushing fentanyl be if we were shown the actual corpses of the children who died from these overdoses?

How much would we be favoring allowing anyone to drink/use drugs and then drive, slaughtering thousands on our roads every year in the face of our own legislature refusing to drop the blood alcohol content for a DUI standard while hundreds will die on this state’s roads because these same people, floating on a sea of mostly free alcohol, refuse to put themselves at risk for these charges and refuse to do that which they demand we do: don’t drink and drive?

King County has no more room at the morgue because of drug use. Would it be helpful if we were shown what actually happens if you OD on drugs? Would the ignorant in, say, Oregon, which is now perhaps the most drug infested state in the country have voted for legalization had they actually seen the REAL impacts of drug use before their vote?

The Real World is frequently brutal. And in this country, much of the brutality is because we ALLOW it. We ALLOW gun crime. We ALLOW the sale of these drugs that are killing us. We ALLOW our troops to get engaged in wars we have no business in. We ALLOW shootings, rapes and assaults because we, as a nation, rarely see the true reality of what these things do. We ALLOW and DO BUSINESS with China who uses slave labor and imprison hundreds of thousands of people because they happen to be Muslim. We do NOTHING except to continue to shovel hundreds of millions of dollars to Iran who is beating their own people to death merely because they can and these people happen to disagree with archaic rules used to oppress an entire gender.

Would the Gay Lobby be so supportive of these people if they could get a close up look at what happens to people thrown off roof tops of buildings because they happen to be homosexual?

You know, TRUE oppression and tyranny? The real thing? The irony of gays supporting Palestine pegs the meter: what would happen to these same people if they were gay and actually IN Palestine?

I believe that many of the American perceptions of these things are based on an imposed level of ignorance. I believe that this is just one of many areas where we are deliberately kept in the dark so we don’t KNOW.

Because to KNOW is to be OUTRAGED. Because what are the impacts on government if the American people became truly enraged?

And we can’t have that.

Can we?