And this fascinates us?

It was a horrific photo. The two-tone black and white image of a young man strung up by his ankles. Dead. His bare chest showed the lashings of the torture that he underwent upon being taken for an informant. That story splashed from across the newspaper, spilling over into my conscience that morning and managed to taint the aroma of my morning coffee. Normally I'm good with such pictures. I don't bat an eye-lid.\nLast Monday, IU hosted three Israeli students who were sponsored to come to Bloomington and talk to us about the conflict of their land and the effect of war in their lives. Their presence reminded me of that photo in U.S. News that morning. The setting of the lynching was Israel. Or Palestine. One or the other. See, I don't even remember the details. All I recall was an anonymous man in his mid-20s. That's my age.\nWhy does this kind of violence usually not provoke any reaction from my part? And why am I by far not the exception in this seemingly cold-hearted conduct? The latter is really the scary part. To not bat an eyelid. Sure, if this occurred here in downtown on Kirkwood, we'd all bat more than an eyelid. It's absurd to think that after a good dose of war, violence and death strewn on TV, some kind of immunity has developed. But developed it is. A kind detachment to all portrayed in the name of news.\nI remember watching the news 10 years ago and seeing some horrific film clip on the 6 p.m. evening report. It depicted some massacre in Africa, and to my shame I can't even recall which turbulent moment was caught on film. It was extremely disturbing on my impressionable mind, and I launched into a massive monologue about how traumatic and morally wrong such pictures were on TV. My parents could only nod in agreement. Such depictions of human suffering and death have now almost become the norm on TV. Nowadays spotting a dead body half-strewn over a ditch isn't an exception and doesn't bring up feelings of horror. For example, this past year, a Dutch politician was gunned down in the grounds of the Dutch Media Park after participating in what became his grand finale interview. The setting was perfect for the press. Give some time for the news to leak out that the eccentric Pim Fortuyn was lying dead, shot outside on the doorstep of their studios and a cornucopia of cameras, camera men and press crawled around the scene. The whole country followed the last minutes of this man's death-live even, can you imagine? And all I could think of was that his next-of-kin would be present among the eyes trained on the TV screen.\n How utterly horrifying.\n We all watched with macabre fascination, with tree branches partially obscuring the view, at the suited man lying sprawled in the car park, blood seeping from a gaping wound in his shiny shaven bald head. And I felt like the vulture that I was. Okay, that wasn't me personally balancing in among the trees to get a better angle, but it was me and all the rest of the country, all vultures circling and scavenging for tidbits of news.\nHow sad have we become? Have we not changed since the amphitheaters of Rome? Clearly we are not as sophisticated and refined a society as we'd like to believe. And that is indeed sad.