Frail children, gasping for breath, convulsing in the dirt during a gas attack in Syria. A cop in Minnesota firing his gun into a family's car. Police ripping people from their wheelchairs as they protest a health-care bill that would leave them without care so a multimillionaire can throw a few more coins on his mountain of money.
Twenty-first century life, in which we stare at screens of various sizes from the time our sleepy eyes open to the time they close, has a distinct feature that is unavoidable even for those aware of it: we are bombarded with images meant to manipulate the way we feel, act, and think.
While we're not the first generation to be pelted with images tailored to create irrational people making irrational decisions -- rationality is the Big Lie at the center of the so-called free market, in case you missed it -- the volume of imagery has become all consuming, filling every crevice of society. Americans average nearly 11 hours of screen time every day. Square away work and sleep, and we spend 86 percent of our free time using mobile devices or staring like the undead into the TV, according to research released last year. Screen time has invaded every part of daily life. No one would deny that.
It's not farfetched to say that our primary function as human beings today is to consume media through screens large and small. It's in this sleek, friendly technological nightmare that we're so easily manipulated -- shaped -- by the pictures our brain processes. Video and still shots of Syrian civilians spread across the media landscape this spring turned hawkish types into salivating animals ready for more war as those usually opposed to bloody conflict could be heard murmuring that something, anything had to be done.
What, exactly, they didn't know. But something. The images were too horrific to ignore. We have our limits. Missiles had to be launched, bullets needed to be fired, people had to be killed for these killings. This call to action -- some action, bloody action -- could not have happened without the well-placed images of immense human suffering. The president, for he is human who sits around in his bathrobe being mad online about the news, isn't immune to this. (A surefire way to predict military action is if major media outlets air footage of women and children dying. It's then that you know the warmongers have what they need: pictures to stoke your fear, contempt, and vague desire for justice, and a pretext for purposeless bloodshed.)
Scroll down your news feed and watch police shoot civilians and bombs blow people to bits in far-off markets and a woman refusing to see a doctor of color and bloodied congressmen being rushed off a baseball field on stretchers and a football player punching a woman in the face and a grieving Palestinian father carrying around the shredded remains of his child in a plastic bag. The images are relentless, they send our heart rates skyward, they twist our stomach until we want to wretch, they destroy any semblance of rational thought. And that's just a regular Wednesday.
"Rise, refuse to be manipulated by moving images, give up and let the tidal wave of manipulation wash over you and grind," I wrote in 96 Ways To Rise And Grind.
How can one even begin to fight the power of this bombardment of images? How can one not be manipulated? It can't be better to be numb -- to shut the emotional spigot as self preservation (note: I'm aware that this is terribly whiny and not at all constructive, but it's something that wears me down). Maybe the answer is to detach oneself from the culture rooted in this manipulation. Maybe it's best to say no, this isn't how I want to live. I don't know.