I’ve never been in the same room as a person as they died. Once, as a military policeman, I worked an accident and saw the lifeless expression on a young driver’s face just a few minutes after his carelessness resulted in his early exit from this life. In July 2006, I visited a relative in the hospital, only to find that an hour later he had passed on.
21st-Century Americans tend to be protected from the realities of our mortality, for the most part. While that’s mostly a good thing, it probably puts us in the minority when compared to people in different places or times throughout history. As I write this, I am less than 24 hours removed from watching “True Grit”, which features a public execution near the beginning of the movie. As the criminals are hanged, the crowd–composed of men, women, and children–applauds. Can you imagine taking a 7-year-old child to an execution today?
The reality, of course, is that people have almost always had a front-row seat to death. But for a short period of time, roughly a hundred years, we’ve been insulated. And when something happened where many people watched a death occur on television, an outcry was the result.
Many of these historical deathly events are now available for public viewing. Thanks to Youtube, you can see hundreds of thousands of Japanese get vaporized, see 67 people die as the Hindenberg explodes, watch JFK get assassinated, or watch his killer die.
But watching someone die via electronic means is not new, and it’s not unique to Youtube. During the Vietnam war, millions watched news footage of a South Vietnamese general shooting a Viet Cong fighter in the head while his hands were tied.
What does this mean? Are we really getting more desensitized to death, as some claim? Are we getting more bloodthirsty? Or are we returning back to where we have been for most of human history, willing to watch as humans pass from this life into the next? Is it a good or a bad thing to be faced with the harsh reality that this world can be dangerous, and death happens? Can any of us who have grown up during a “safe” time even able to make an objective assessment of this question?
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