Friday, June 10, 2022

Should we see their faces?

     It was nearly 40 years ago, in the mid-1980s. A woman called me at the Daily Journal in Wheaton to say her kindergartener had been raped by the janitor at his Montessori school. She called police.
     “I expected them to show up with their sirens blaring,” she said. Instead, nothing happened. The man wasn’t even charged; it’s hard to build a criminal case on the testimony of a 5-year old.
     I found this out while writing a weeklong series on child sex abuse in the western suburbs, speaking with therapists, victims, even a molester in prison. I stopped by the office of Brian Telander, then head of the DuPage County state’s attorney’s criminal division, to discuss the case.
     On his desk was a large photograph of people gathered together. At first glance, it seemed like a family Christmas portrait from Sears. Then I saw the blood. Telander saw me staring, and turned the picture so I could get a better look. A dead woman sprawled on a bed, her dead children piled around her.
     That image flashed in my head for years, especially when coming home at night. It returned after the slaughter in Uvalde, Texas, when people began urging that photos of the slain children be used to try to jolt America from its awful inertia on gun safety.
     “There must have been some really gruesome photos taken as part of the investigation in Uvalde,” writes reader Cathy T. “If the politicians who refuse to listen to reason and act because of the blood money they receive from the NRA were forced to view photos of the mangled bodies of the children and teachers who were gunned down, do you think they might be sickened enough to do what needs to be done?” 
     Good question. Maybe. History is studded with instances where shocking photographs stir the public. Those pits of naked bodies at Auschwitz. Monks setting themselves on fire to protest Vietnam. And the prime example, Emmett Till, murdered in Mississippi, his body dumped in a river. His mother insisted on an open-coffin funeral, and photos of his battered, bloated face energized the civil rights movement.

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15 comments:

  1. "You never unsee that stuff." I know that would be the case for me, and I never, ever want to see photos from those classrooms in Uvalde. If it should happen, either with the permission or even at the request of family members, I still don't want to see. Count me out.
    There was a series of articles in The Intercept on this, immediately following the event. One was titled "AR-15s Were Made To Explode Human Bodies", which noted the request of Texas Police to obtain DNA samples from parents on that day. That was enough for me. I'm not made of such stern stuff. If pictures are what it takes to change someone's mind... to need to SEE the horror, then fine. Perhaps it would serve a purpose.
    But I worry/suspect that "People revert to form" is - shamefully - the larger truth here.

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    1. "Men can get used to anything, the scoundrels." The Inspector in "Crime and Punishment."

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  2. Happy birthday we share a birthday. Gralyn Simpson

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  3. Majority of Americans are for some form of gun control and they/we don't need to watch the horror. Politicians that are objecting to gun control on the other hand deserve to live and relive the horror. They should be shown the pictures and videos daily. Give them the Clockwork Orange treatment.

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  4. There is an iconic image of a dead child in a fireman's arms that was taken after the Our Lady of Angels school fire, in the Humboldt Park neighborhood. It first appeared in the American, but it was later used for years on fire prevention posters. I saw it over and over again for years, in junior high and in high school. Print media used to be pretty graphic...in some cases a lot more graphic than what flies in print today. Gruesome images of car wrecks, and mangled disaster victims.It was a much different time.

    But, bad as all that was, the kid in the OLA photo was just soot-covered and quite dead. His limp form was merely soaked by the firehoses, not burned beyond recognition. Some years earlier, the same photographer had snapped an infamous close-up of unrecognizable blackened bodies, piled up in the rear door of a CTA streetcar that had hit a gasoline tanker truck. That image ran on front pages nationwide, with few complaints...and with cutlines like: "The Last Stop Was Death." It still haunts me to this day.

    Of course, far worse is now easily available electronically, and literally at your fingertips. I try to avoid most of it. If they do end up showing those Texas kids, i don't want to know about it, let alone see it. The human brain is far more complex than any smartphone. Better memory, greater storage capacity, and no delete function. Once an awful image gets inside your head, it's pretty hard...if not impossible...to erase it.

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    1. That would be the streetcar crash at 63rd & State in 1950.
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1950_Chicago_streetcar_crash

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    2. Bingo. Showed the graphic images to my kid sister when she was six. She has never forgiven me for that, and she just turned 71. A book called "The Green Hornet Streetcar Disaster" was published a decade ago. It's a tough read.

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  5. As I read today's column, I wondered if you were going to make mention of those anti-abortion protestors with their gross-out signs standing around the Loop in days past, and you did.

    They were a morbidly fascinating bunch, generally standing along the sidewalks with their oversized bloody images so that incoming commuters from the train stations and cars on the bridges couldn't miss seeing them. Some would hold up their sign with one hand while offering brochures to passers-by with the other, and seemed genuinely perplexed that nobody would take one. ("Hey, love your photos! Show me more!")

    These protestors sometimes included kids as well, holding the same ugly signs, and with expressions showing that they would really much rather be anywhere else. I was sometimes tempted to walk up to one of them and ask, "Why aren't you in school?" (I suspect the answer would have been "Home schooling.")

    Based on those signs, their main argument seemed to be, "Abortion is yucky." Well, Duh. If that's your only line of argument, being reduced to holding up signs of awful images, then you don't really have anything else on your side. I don't think the debate on guns needs to go there.

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    1. The sign I carried at last month's pro-choice rally read: "Don't like abortion? Then don't have one... (A public cervix announcement)" Saw a lot of phone cameras pointed my way.

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  6. Except for the very sick, hunters don’t use assault rifles because it obliterates the meat. I’m sure there are photos taken by those very sick hunters of their prey.
    You probably don’t have to show mutilated children to get the point across to those on the fence. A destroyed deer may do.

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  7. Neil, I usually enjoy figuring out how the photos accompanying the post relate to the topic, if it's not obvious. Today, I'm baffled. You seldom seem to post versions of the same thing 4 times, so I assume we're supposed to take note. But I don't know what this sculpture represents. A google image search was no help, or I wouldn't be asking, but could you please tell us what this is?

    The only guess I can come up with is a woman with leprosy from the Museum of Surgical Science...

    I definitely agree with those who have absolutely no interest in seeing the Uvalde photos. Whether they might have an impact on the gun debate is debatable, I suppose, as you note.

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    1. Jakash: Sorry to be obscure. I don't have any photos of slaughtered kids, and didn't want to seize something online. I did take this photo of a statue in a side chamber at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. The holes I believe have to do with the casting process. I had three version, close, closer and closest, and it seemed as if it were zooming in. Maybe it didn't work.

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    2. Casting process / odd representation of leprosy; Uffizi Gallery / Surgical Science Museum; -- tomAYto / tomAHto, I suppose. ; ) Yeah, I get the zooming in idea now. Thanks.

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  8. In response your column of Friday, June10th, "Should we see their faces?" Some no longer had faces to be seen and were identified through clothing & DNA. Life & Death. If photos are "too graphic" for those deciding on our "laws" then perhaps THEY merely do the clean up after the shootings. Perhaps, THEY assist the morticians as the remains are put into caskets &/or urns. THEY have options that the victims no longer have .......... !

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  9. I have seen the photos of their faces. Imagining the terror they felt realizing that this was happening again and this time in their school. They'd been warned and told what to do in the case of an active shooter. But they were not adequately protected and we were hesitant to come to their aid as they lay hiding or dying.

    Each time this happens I'm angrier and more appalled . This time I am disturbed to the point of constant nagging sadness . im grateful to not see graphic photos of the carnage. It would be too much too bare.

    Children murdered by lunatics because grown people are too weak to take action against a culture of violence that is present within our society

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