Paste has published images and photos from Yemen, writing, "Despite their propensity to offend viewer sensibilities, these scenes are necessary for American audiences. Images have a unique power to humanize brutality—pastemagazine.com/articles/2018/… via @pastemagazine 1/
"to connect terms like “civilian casualties” and “collateral” to faces across the globe belonging to people who, as it turns out, look an awful lot like us," they write. "Footage can sway public opinion--2/
"and catalyze policy change by delivering us from our detachment and laying bare our egocentrism." Unfortunately, I don't think this is so. I suspect we've become gravely desensitized to images like these.
We've seen so many of them, both (endlessly) in movies, on the Internet, real and fake images from conflicts around the world. I don't know if we can even really perceive the difference between real and fake anymore;
and I suspect for many it registers as "Yet another conflict in the Middle East." "Yet more gruesome photos." "Yet more suffering." "Yet more suffering for which we're in some way responsible." I don't mean to suggest the chief tragedy in Yemen is what it does to *us*--
-obviously, the tragedy is what it does to Yemen. But there's a subsidiarity tragedy in our loss of the ability to be horrified, and in our instinctive first reaction: "There's nothing we can do about it." In this case, unlike many others, there *is* something we can do.
