TV, reality, and war

It's been 14 days since this war started. Only two weeks. Yet it seems like it has been going on forever. Night and day, 24-hour, non-stop coverage of this war has left most of the public saturated with endless and repetitive information (or misinformation).

If you tune in to any of the big cable news channels over a span of an hour you will hear the same pieces of mostly worthless information over, and over, and over again. You will see reporters "imbedded" with ground troops, military experts discussing the war plan, and news anchors continuously asking themselves whether Saddam Hussein is dead or alive. Multiply that times 1000 and you will get an idea of what watching CNN, MSNBC, or FOX News during the past days has been like.

After two weeks of excruciatingly monotonous TV coverage of this war I feel tired. I wish we could talk about something other than this war. I wish I could write about something other than this war. But we can't. How can we evade the omnipresent? How can we escape the reality? How can we resist the temptation to grab the remote and tune in to CNN?

As much as I dislike the news coverage, I can't help tuning back in. Perhaps somewhere along the line, our rightful desire to be well informed was transformed into a relentless addiction. In a way, this war is like a powerful and destructive drug. The more we watch it the more we need it. In this sense, coverage of this war is no different than other Reality TV shows. It's like watching Fear Factor, or Joe Millionaire, or American Idol. They are all terrible shows. They are dull and they insult our intelligence, and yet we don't seem to get enough of them.

The sad part of this is that while we watch this war as if we were watching MTV's Real World, millions of people are experiencing the horrors of war first-hand. But they are so far away! What do we care? They are just Iraqis. We almost rationalize the suffering of the Iraqi people as if it were caused by an inevitable natural disaster like an earthquake or a hurricane.

We forget that the American military action is responsible for their misery. We forget that their lives are just as valuable as ours. That their security is just as important to them as it is to us. That it hurts them just as much to lose a loved one. We forget that it is not their fault that Saddam Hussein rules their country. If every innocent people of the world had to pay for their ruthless leaders we would all be dead.

Do we know what it must be like to have our own cities and towns relentlessly bombed night and day? Why can't we sympathize with the Iraqi fathers and mothers who have to protect their children from the dangers of war? Do you fully realize what it must be like to lose your son to a stray bomb, or to lose your mother and sisters because they were riding in a van that wouldn't stop at a military checkpoint? The truth is we will never understand what these people are going through unless the same thing happened to us.

And they can't even put up a fight. There is something inherently unfair about that. The mightiest military power in the history of the world is destroying a small country with a poorly equipped and weak army. Isn't this like the big, strong middle school bully who punches the smaller children and takes their lunch away?

But who cares as long as we are safe. And indeed, we are protected. First, we are secure because we are many thousands of miles away from Iraq. But we are also miles away psychologically. Seeing all of this through the lens of the camera insulates us from the real horrors of war because what we see on TV seems utterly unreal to us. We keep thinking this is all a scripted show, with actors and fake blood. We have to think this is all unreal, that this is just another reality TV show.

Otherwise, how would we be able to deal with the truth? We know the truth, but we do not want to acknowledge it. There is no room for it in our world. We don't have time for it in our busy lives. We can't afford to stop and think about what is really going on. We can't ruin our pretty lives with thoughts of death and misery. But that is the truth of what is happening.

The human toll is more than we can bear. Hundreds of people are dying. American, Iraqi, and British lives are being lost for no good reason. Towns and cities are being destroyed, families are leaving their homes, and relationships are being fragmented. But from the comfort of our living rooms it doesn't seem so bad. We can always turn the TV off.