Living with trauma: Is our tolerance for violence too high?
shooting at Apalachee High School in Barrow County, Georgia, was released, I won’t watch it either.At first, it was simply because having those images as part of my memory wasn’t healthy for me.
But as more traumatic images of death entered the public domain, I realized that each event returned me to that evening when my mom’s question made me understand how even once-ordinary people could be transformed into executioners, enacting the rawest and most intimate expressions of human carnage.That doesn’t mean I’m not paying attention, desensitized, or have checked out—quite the contrary.
But in a country where moral progress has come on the literal backs of our mutilated bodies, I am aware that disturbing visuals of human suffering could be exploited for short-term sensationalism, which Black history warns doesn’t necessarily instigate lasting change.
One of the first graphic images to go viral was in 1863, two years into the Civil War. Military doctors from the Union Army were examining a man who had escaped from a plantation in Louisiana when they discovered gruesome scarring on his back.
