If you’re like me, you too must’ve been astounded at events that occurred on the morning of October 7th, 2023.

Before authorities became censorious and excised, pixelated, or froze graphic videos, security camera raw feeds from Israel were the 21st century versions of what we may imagine warfare was like during the antique. No quarter given. Wanton slaughter delivered as cruelly as possible.

The sequence that remains fixed in the front of my memory occurs in an Israeli town, one that could’ve been Anyplace, USA. Two girls bolt from a house. One escapes, the other succumbs to her fright. She falls upon the lawn then manages to kneel. She faces the house.

Seconds later, a Hamas terrorist saunters from the structure. Loaded for bear, he is in no hurry. He walks towards the girl and halts several feet away from her. The camera’s distance does not permit viewers to determine whether the girl’s head is so bowed forward she can’t see his face. Maybe she can but from under her eyes.

Again, the lens isn’t spy camera sharp. It awards a sense, not clarity. Interpreting what was seen, he spoke to her. May we surmise? Did the terrorist offer any reasons for what he was about to wrest from her? Did he seethe as he blamed this girl for the whole sorrows of Palestinians? Did he speak any words which rationalized (in his mind) what had happened that morning, what would occur between them? Or did he spend her last moments summoning whatever beast possesses radicals to abandon their humanity and let them see victims as less than human?

Did he hesitate in order to think? To build the power required to kill in cold blood. One thing to disgorge bullets across distance during a frenetic firefight. Quite another to be close enough to see eyes.

Proximity should make killing harder.

Viewers may’ve wondered this in the several seconds he stood before shooting her in the head. His victim became a marionette whose strings had been sliced. Limbs went every which way before she collapsed awkwardly on the lawn. His murder committed, his victim a heap, the terrorist strolled off camera.

Again, until authorities gained control of the feeds streamed, viewers in horrified safety watched Hamas scythe Israelis. That morning was not combat. Just dedicated slaughter and kidnapping.

Several hours later, the earlier gruesome tableaux presented our world were sanitized. By then the kidnappings which would become hostage taking monopolized organized news reports. Of the day’s earlier killings, one saw aftermaths. Israel Defense Force spokespersons curtly detailed attacks. These enabled imaginations to be engaged to their fullest. And while there are few horrors worse than monsters we can invent, perhaps authorities provided a disservice by “protecting” viewers of the morning’s carnage by real monsters.

Our society discusses desensitization brought on through video games. Or ultra-violent movies where gunfire shreds bodies and paint rolls surfaces with blood. On one hand, viewers understand these are make-believe scenes. On the other hand, special effects, particularly here in the United States, not only artfully envision demises but also make them more palatable with each endless bullet cascade audiences enjoy.

In a bold move, October 7th authorities should’ve let the raw feeds run unfettered, unfiltered, unedited, uncensored. On loops at that.

Plenty have watched and played variations of video games where one combatant rips off the arm of another and beats him over his with the blood-spurting limb. That’s entertainment.

Maybe our society would become less cavalier about such pastimes, and by extension how we forsake our strictures, if real life could inject itself into our notions of acceptable violence.

Pop culture injuries and deaths are artistic. They should be. They’re choreographed, blocked out, lighted, filmed at best angles for maximum effect. Seeing these onscreen could even reach heights of tragedy. The kind that imparts lessons which may be coolly dissected and discussed at far comfortable removes.

Perhaps if we saw more living people killed, the more unfeelingly as possible, we wouldn’t be so accepting of killing. Now, the action freezes when triggers are pulled. Killer and target remain fixed. Like a homicidal Ode to a Grecian Urn. Wouldn’t impacts make the results less dependent on our visualizations carrying the action forward?

We know bullets will strike bodies. Blood and viscera will spurt. People will die. We know that. How would our acceptance change were we to see pulled triggers emit projectiles which delivered mortality?

Right now, we’re on casual terms with killing. Seeing death carried through against real people should jar us from our everyday complacency, no? Real blood splattered and actual corpses on the way to rotting ought to inject reality. Might add levels of contemplation violent video game designers never want bunded into their entertainments. Might make gamers uncomfortable with unaccountable goals requiring “killing.”

It’d be a start.

As we are aware, Hamas’ endgame that morning just wasn’t the wanton slaughter of Israelis. The terrorist also wanted hostages. Through them they could make Israel as well as civilized people globally feel injured and helpless. After all, didn’t it became easy to vicariously slip into the misery of prisoners who’d been living quotidian lives suddenly violently snatched from cooking breakfast or recuperating from a previous night’s music festival? Then, of course, there was imagining the worst tortures being inflicted on Israelis by Hamas, a group so inhumane it will sacrifice fellow Palestinians at the behest of its radical Islamic zero-sum ideology.

Despite the brazenness of Hamas’ marauding on the seventh, surely civilized people everywhere hoped the psychotic radical Islamists could somehow be talked off the building ledge while holding the baby over the street below. While Palestinians have genuine grievances against Israel, Hamas going on a murder, rape, kidnapping jag has absolutely failed addressing them.

Sane people expected Israel to keep its powder dry. To furiously work backchannels it has with Arab Muslim nations whose connections with Hamas could produce hostage releases. One thought as adept as Israelis are with vengeance they’d delay retaliation. Indeed, even make the cosmetic concessions Hamas could bray as fissures in Israeli invulnerability. That sort of thing would play marvelously among the aggrieved Arab Muslims in that swath of the world. But really, who wouldn’t have known that once the hostages were freed, some insignificant allowances granted to Palestinians, the full weight of the Jewish State’s apparatus would’ve hounded and eliminated Hamas anywhere and everywhere?

Even the terrorists who’d evaded death on October 7th were already reciting their prayers. What’s more certain than the inevitable?

The problem is the inevitable, what was expected never occurred. Neither there in the Middle East between the warring factions, nor outside that cage holding observers supporting either tribe’s American proxies.

We live in a new era. Instead, something wholly incalculable disgusted us. New generations have come to the fore. Their knowledge of the past is shallow on the way to nonexistent. Mid-20th century events and upheavals that still have strong pulls upon our present day are to them to be revised, cherrypicked, or ignored altogether.

After the initial October 7th shocks were hurdled and people wanted to express solidarity with Israelis Hamas had snatched, posters of the “disappeared” appeared throughout American cities and campuses. New Yorkers who resided in the Metropolitan Area during the first weeks after 9/11 may remember flyers beseeching passersby whether any of us might’ve possibly seen the “missing persons” pictured who had worked in the World Trade Center or in its vicinity Tuesday morning. That perhaps luck had enabled them to escape the destruction yet its trauma had somehow jarred them into some state of amnesia.

Hey. Better a farfetched salve than the hardest likelihood of reality.

When the same sort of notices appeared throughout the world, who didn’t immediately harken back nearly 22 years before? The poignancy of what these “missing persons” represented should’ve had every civilized man and woman stopping for at least moments of reflection. But our lives, our society, have both veered strangely since September 2001.

Instead of reflexively commiserating with captives’ families and friends, a loud, large, vocal minority of students throughout campuses nationwide approved the injuries Hamas had inflicted against Israel. As if badly cooked eggs or enjoying music others might distaste deserved the murderous morning Hamas delivered.

Bereft of sympathy though fully clasping a one-sided grasp of the history incessantly roiling the Levantine, students here, young men and women who’ve been in the forefront of almost sacrificing due process for victims’ insistences, did their utmost to hold murdered, raped, and kidnapped Israelis responsible for their own grief. That somehow 1948, 1967, everything in between and after justified Hamas’ Sunday morning rampage.

Who else wondered how a generation professing itself more tolerant and mindful than its predecessors could mar or rip down posters mostly picturing contemporaries? Take away the prisoners’ origins and they’d have plenty more in common with the Americans exulting in their capture than the terrorists lauded.

Who else also wondered how a generation advertising itself as overly sensitized to absolute strangers’ suffering could deepen the agony of captives’ kindred through such callous effacement? Were these horrid gestures intended to show solidarity with Hamas and through them Palestinians?

Likely unknown to its Stateside campus supporters, the terrorists would have scorned the Americans’ pro-Palestinian expressions. And instead of bothering with acknowledgement, may’ve dismissed the young know-nothings empty activities.

In fact, given the slightest opportunity, and possessing the reach, Hamas would’ve gleefully grabbed up any of the at safe remove naïve Americans warping the terrorists into “heroes”; into “voices and arms of the people.” Such eye-opening irony would’ve been a too savory – but lethal – kind of O. Henry tale.

But wouldn’t that be just for people whose milk of human kindness sometimes runs toward ersatz?

When CCTV finally proved its value and aided apprehension of those heartless children who desecrated “missing persons” posters, the most indignant among us adults might’ve expected some sort of ideological claptrap to underpin their treacherous vandalism. After all, if one’s rigidity is the kind that can justify random elimination of one’s mirror images that cold-bloodedness needs manifesto-dense clarifications.

No annotating required.

Instead of hearing of roads taken to the Damascus leading to erasing strangers’ presences, the two-legged ripping and shredding autonomes resorted to the too ignorant to be walking on two legs dodge: none knew why they did it. They’d seen other berserkers destroy. Seeing them enraged summoned some asocial instinct thought long snuffed beneath culture.

Until seeing pictures of kidnapped Israelis on walls or posts, had it ever occurred to any of the vandals to commit such defilements? Or did the Jews pictured trigger them?

Naturally after capture the criminals apologized. Who doesn’t apologize after being caught? Too bad these deviants weren’t tracked afterwards. Nice as apologizing is, and easy as it is to convincingly fake, where’s repentance? How about big heaps of atonement? Why are we simply satisfied through admissions of guilt? Particularly with wrongdoings of the most soulless kind. What students did to those posters wasn’t akin to an errant baseball through a neighbor’s window.

They knew their blades would pierce deep. Acknowledgment of this only after exposure. How was there no foresight of their imminent malice?

As mentioned in the preceding post, Stop Your Sobbing, actually treating “trigger words” as threats which must be subdued had a big hand in what we’re seeing as breakdowns in conversation and comportment. This doesn’t refer to freedom of speech. It refers to those occasions when having one’s say might return unpleasant replies.

Why contend with that when replies can be blocked?

Or as some Republican once said, “Say what you want, but watch what you say.” Of course, that premature fascist meant the powers that be, the weight of the state might turn to grind upon the speaker. Rather, let’s return to what was understood before right-wingers usurped conservatism. Before rightward free-speech screamers hijacked the brand then transformed it into a sour reactionary mash which choked dissent, discourse, and debate.

In the old days when Americans throughout the spectrum were articulate, men and women possessed more than enough rhetorical vigor to parry and riposte arguments which sometimes detoured into vitriol.

Face it. If you’re gonna give, better expect to get some back. Done properly, you ought to get or give better than you got or gave. It used to be the American Way.

Now our public rhetoric has far more in common with playground taunts. The adolescent heartbreak that results sends “hurt” immature adults scampering to school authorities or grief merchants, wailing about verbal injuries they precipitated.

Since our society has become so litigious, today’s authorities don’t just bend over backwards to mollify complainants. Now, they contort themselves into bondage knots. Gone are the days when no-nonsense types filled university administrative offices. Those grand Augustans remedied such febrility with succinct, “Get over it! And get outta here!”

Brevity, then delivered gruffly, was a fine introduction for students to start distinguishing the essential from inconsequential. Knowing this distinction probably serves as one of the main factors why Boomers achieved much while Gen Z is having much done to it.

After October 7th, timorous academic chiefs should’ve summoned the spirits of their iron-fisted predecessors. Those past figures would’ve foreseen then forbade the disorderliness that would manifest with tribal-based on-campus protests.

Encampments on campus malls stunk upon first suggestion. That these were allowed to rise didn’t only give tacit approval to subsequent chaos but awarded full-throated okey-dokes for the asylums’ craziest to run rampant.

Even if there had been any equivalency between protesters and targets of their rages, nothing would’ve brought balance to the eventual disruptions which roiled academe.

(To be continued.)

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