When I was growing up back in the 1980s, the whispering buzz among my peers would amp up when something particularly transgressive began to infiltrate our collective adolescent consciousness. Often it involved stories of friends who somehow managed to see R-rated movies that, theoretically, they shouldn’t have been seeing.
But there was one franchise of sorts that, although I never actually saw anything related to it, nonetheless generated even more-hushed-than-usual conversations between classes: Faces of Death.
These videos were essentially montages of purportedly real death scenes. Doing some research, it seems as if some of those macabre moments were genuine, while others were campily staged, horror-movie style. But back in the day, I remember classmates talking about these supposed “snuff films” with the darkly hallowed reverence reserved for something that was truly beyond the pale.
Simply put: Good kids didn’t watch movies showing real people dying. This was, we all knew instinctively, really, really bad stuff. The kind of stuff kids shouldn’t ever see. The kind of stuff no one ever needed to see.
Thirty-five years later, we can be exposed quite easily to scenes of death on YouTube, newspapers and on the nightly news.
What was once the ultimate taboo is now just another soundbite, just another tragic story in our hyper-violent, instantly connected world.
In just the last several weeks, we’ve had yet more videos of ISIS horrifically executing people, videos of Planned Parenthood officials reportedly doing unspeakable things to aborted fetus bodies, pictures of fleeing immigrant bodies washing up on the shores of Europe. There’s even a video of a murderer filming his assassination of a reporter and her cameraman in real time, as if he was capturing a grim scene for a first-person shooter video game. Except that this time it was deadly real.
How should we respond to such images?
Without saying that there’s always a right answer, or that there’s never a reason to watch such things, I would like to make this suggestion: We need to respond with tremendous caution to the temptation to click on images associated with these stories when we stumble across them online.
And it is a temptation. Perhaps not the same category as spending money we don’t have or bending the truth or eating too much ice cream. But a temptation on the same order as the morbid curiosity that goads us to rubberneck at an accident on the side of the road when we drive past it.
In a world with so much information, and so many shockingly violent stories, it’s easy, I think, to grow numbed to the value, beauty and dignity of human life without even realizing it. We can grow accustomed to mindlessly or habitually clicking on links to so many different things. We might engage these disturbing glimpses of death without thinking about what we’re actually doing—and without thinking about how passively consuming this “information” (right next to the latest story about the stock market or Kim Kardashian) might be negatively impacting our perspective on life and death, on the value of real individuals who have been made in God’s image.
There may be legitimate reasons to expose ourselves to such images. Still, if we do so, it needs to be thoughtful and purposeful, not passive and uncritical. We need to take the time to process and reflect upon what we’ve seen. Otherwise we risk becoming further dehumanized and degraded ourselves. And we may need to process it out loud with someone else.
I’m thankful that news outlets exist to report the reality of these atrocities, because they’re important and they impact our society.
But because these news sources have done exactly that on our behalf, I’ve decided that, for me anyway, it’s enough to keep abreast of the news without actually exposing my soul fully to this real-world violence. I haven’t watched an ISIS video or the Planned Parenthood exposé videos. I just don’t think there’s a compelling reason for me to do so.
Each of us needs to make a decision when it comes to stuff like this. Because it’s likely not going to stop. And because if we don’t make an active decision to engage or avoid purposely, we’re more likely to make a passive choice that could damage our hearts and souls in ways we don’t even realize.
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