Monday, violence hit home once again. The explosions that went off at the Boston Marathon eerily mirror the Oklahoma City bombings almost exactly 18 years ago. The images taken at the scene are visceral and haunting, and there has been no attempt to shield the general public from them.
The front page of CNN was a man covered in blood being carried by police officers to an ambulance, the New York Times showed a woman lying in a pool of blood. There are some that would argue that forcing us to face this violence through images is excessive, that each individual should have the choice as to what they want to see. But ignoring the violence in our society is a disservice to progress.
As anyone who has seen photos from Boston or Newtown can attest, it’s hard to separate oneself from violence and its impact when it’s staring you in the face. The old adage that a photo is worth a 1,000 words is never more true than in the case of indiscriminate bloodshed. These images are difficult to look at, but no matter how gruesome they are, it’s important to do so in order to truly understand and internalize the brutality of these attacks.
Nowadays we are constantly inundated with images of violence, whether it be in movies or video games. While these do include excessive violence, killing a Nazi zombie on Playstation 3 or watching Sylvester Stallone chop someone to pieces on a TV screen is different than seeing photos of children running from a school shooter or the horror-struck faces of victims’ relatives.
Video games and movies make violence seem abstract—the people are either virtual or actors, the deaths fake. The first video game kill or death scene may be difficult, but after two or three scenes it’s no longer an issue. You, as the player, or the viewer, are separated from it by the knowledge that what you’re seeing isn’t real. News images make violence concrete and relatable on a deeper level.
Why, you may be asking, do we need to internalize the meaning of violence? Just like a child saying a dirty word, it’s easier to perpetrate an attack when you don’t fully understand the consequences. When death seems as easy to bring about as pressing a button on an Xbox controller, it can be difficult to comprehend just how detrimental it is. This is when visceral visuals come into play.
Seeing is an important part of human development. Infants learn to recognize facial expressions very early on, and 65 percent of the population are visual learners. On average, the brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text. That means that one image depicting a bombing victim being placed on a stretcher while bystanders look on in horror does more to educate an individual about the evil of violence than an extremely detailed article about the same event.
Of course, images of violence shouldn’t be overused, which ends up happening with movies and video games. But when events of terror occur it’s important that these images are shown. It’s easier to ignore the reality that indiscriminate violence doesn’t happen in the developed world when we don’t see it. It’s easier to see these events as marginal when we can skim over articles about them instead of being faced with images.
That is why national media is so important. Even in the age of social media they are responsible for providing us with the majority of these images. That being said, they need to do a better job of presenting us with images of violence even when there’s no spectacle of terror and the participants are among the population’s marginalized.
The death toll in Boston is sickening, but more people were murdered in Chicago just last weekend, and there was no media frenzy, statement by the President, or national push to find the killers. Media sources have a duty to expose us to the violence around us—but especially those that don’t constitute massive acts of terror. This public acknowledgement is paramount to our being able to grapple with violence as a national issue. As a country, we need to not shirk away from the visuals just because they’re distressing, we should see them as an effort to educate.
What happened in Boston and Newtown is abhorrent, and as a nation we need to strive to do better in teaching non-violence. There are a number of ways to do this, but first and foremost we need to confront the fact that this level of violence, while rarely publicized, still happens here every day. The first step is to see—to see what violence is and what it does. Only after we face the visual evidence can we begin to work to stem it.
