From Tom Dispatch
By David Swanson

An artist should keep a human skull on the desk as a constant reminder of death, of the need to — in the words of a currently popular country tune — live like you were dying. A peace activist should keep a photo in his or her wallet of a small Iraqi child torn to pieces — a constant reminder to live like others are dying.

The trouble is that we find it almost unbearable to look at such images. We believe the war would end if the corporate media showed such images, yet we turn our faces away if they’re placed in front of us; even more so, if they happen to be images of torture or of soldiers enjoying humiliating Iraqis. Worst of all are the gruesome images that soldiers have created themselves in this new digital age as war trophies.

If such images were in our wallets, we wouldn’t want them to give anyone the impression that we took some sort of sick pleasure in seeing Iraqis blown apart. Yet some of those images have come to us over the Internet from U.S. soldiers who evidently found exactly that pleasure in taking and posting them. As hard as we find it to look at the images, we find it a hundred times harder to try to think our way inside the minds that could do such a thing. We’re afraid that, once there, we couldn’t freely leave.

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