I get heavy duty when I can't sleep.

[wheelieterp]

I admit, I am addicted to information. This age of the internet is the perfect time and the perfect place for the existence of someone like me: I am the opposite of anachronism. My iPhone has four news apps, and I check them for up-dates obsessively. With my iPhone, I am also constantly connected to my email, Facebook, LiveJournal, AOL Instant Messenger, Weather Bug, Wikipedia, YouTube and everything else via Google, complete with maps and GPS. The Ruling Reddcub says my nose is constantly in my iPhone.

I don't know about anyone else, but this ability to be anywhere on the planet where there is news almost instantly has made me more sensitive to witnessing atrocity. When everything and everyone one the planet can be streamed to my cell phone, I lose my American-made skill of hiding behind my little piece of the hegemony shield.

I grew up watching sterilized moments on television news, shot through the rose-colored lens of corporate media and censored by the need to sell advertising. If we show the true, horrific images of the end results of our endless political turmoils, people get overwhelmed and turn away, missing the commercials for the products that make our lives better. Peaceful. Comfortable. It's not the over-exposure to violence on TV that makes us callous to it, it's the sanitizing of it.

So because of this sensitivity, I have to spend time to steel myself before I can face what I perceive to be my duty of bearing witness. Until tonight, at two thirty in the morning, when I can't sleep and move out the couch in the living room, so as not to disturb my honey, until this time when I finally felt ready, I had not witnessed the YouTube video of Neda dying on the street in Tehran.

I searched YouTube and found several versions, including one from TV news in which her face was digitally obscured, and the video edited and looped.

I am sad to say that I watched that one. Perhaps I am not steeled enough, but I could not look Neda in the face as she died: a young woman killed by a system so much infinitely bigger than her.... Even now, I tear-up at the thought that in her face I would recognize surprise. I am terrified that what I would see in her un-obscured face on video would be an utter disbelief at the fact that righteousness was not, after all, a shield. And then I think that my naive faith in righteousness probably stems from viewing the world through the filters of a privilege of censorship, and berate myself for failing to know that someone else, somewhere else in the world probably knew better than to believe that Disney crap and I think: "Maybe Neda's face didn't show surprise."

And then I become even more afraid.

Comments

[i-maenad.livejournal.com]

Even having not seen the footage, you bring tears to my eyes.

Also, if I didn't already love you, this phrase alone would make me love you: "hegemony shield"