How did we get to this?
The following image has haunted me for the last 3 months.
I'm sure that any media-savvy person has seen worse... worse in the sense of violence and physical harm. Yet somehow this image taps into my greatest fears. Not to be outdone with flashy images of Americans being beheaded or Nazi death-pits, it speaks of simple despair.
It would be so easy to extrapolate from this; so easy to post about the civilian casualties here, the victims of natural disaster there. But this picture doesn't haunt me for political reasons. It doesn't haunt me because I could have done something.
It haunts me because it's terribly, terribly sad. It haunts me because the flip-side of every Mother Teresa is a Joseph Goebbels. Dukkha is not losing hot water during a shower. It's not Tivo erasing your favorite show. It's not even breaking up with your high-school sweetheart.
Dukkha is the image above. And I'll be damned before I have learned to accept it.
posted by KOM @ 1:58:00 AM
6 Comments
6 Comments:
Is that a small child sitting in the middle of all of that chaos? That in itself haunts me. I can't stand the thought of children suffering.
You're right; it is terribly sad. And I'm with you on the Dukkha thing. Just because it's there (everywhere, actually) doesn't mean you have to accept it.
Sadness.
I've never seen that picture before. I swear, I'll never understand this world we live in.
I've seen that... it was on the cover of Life that year I believe....
Horrible image.
But it speaks volumes.
Ugh...
One more shout in the dark here: I just read some of the links on the Rape of Nanking, and I just want to vomit.
I think I'll pass on lunch today.
From what I hear, a lot of the same atrocities are happening in North Korea presently. It's too bad that all of the murderous scum on the planet don't gravitate to one location where we could nuke them all.
/pipe dream
The worst thing I ever saw was a NIN boot-leg video for Closer. I won't even dare describe it.
I actually see hope in that picture. There was all that destruction and the baby lived. Someone had to have taken a picture of that baby. So perhaps the photographer rescued it.
Dukkha awesome term...there was a guy in my psyc class who pretended to do research on Buddhism and said he couldn't find the word Dukkha being used except in some esoteric philosophy book...sure whatever.
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