A haunting, sickening image

I was not alive during the Vietnam War or when the Kent State shootings happened, and I was less than three when the Tiananmen protests happened. But, like most other Americans my age, I've seen the images that reified both traumatic events for the American public: the young man lying face down in the middle of the street as a young woman kneels behind him, crying out; the little girl screaming in pain as she runs naked down a dirt road outside Trang Bang; the VC officer being shot in the head by a South Vietnamese general; the protester facing down the column of tanks. They were moments that, long afterward through these photographs, still have the power to bring us down to zero, to sear into us with raw emotion, to shock and sicken us, to make real for us the suffering of an event we are likely to consider otherwise only in abstraction.

The gory video taken in Tehran yesterday, of a sixteen-year-old girl who had been shot through the heart by a Basij militia sharpshooter, had the same effect on me – like a slap to the face. This isn’t just about a change in Iran’s government anymore, this isn’t about some abstract, hyper-rationalised geopolitical struggle anymore – a healthy young woman has been senselessly shot dead, her life ended. I wonder whether, back then, on seeing those other photographs, people felt the same kind of sadness and frustration and rage that I can't help but feel now, having seen her lying spread-eagled in a pool of blood on the side of some road in Tehran.

I don’t like quoting other bloggers, but echidneofthesnakes captures well what I’m feeling about now:

She died in front of my eyes, on a video from Iran, a video I hadn't intended to click on and then it was too late. I'm bent over double with nausea. She was a young woman, demonstrating against her government. Now she is a young woman, dead. It's not a movie and she will not rise again, laughing while wiping off all that ketchup from her face. It's real. It's for good. And it's wrong, on so many levels.

My nausea is unimportant. But not the general nausea of these events, the nausea elicited by those Americans who use all this for political gamesmanship, turning it all against Obama or for Obama, checking first on blogs which side they should be supporting, checking if they should be for the demonstrators or for Ahmadinejad, based on the overall political value of each package. And I wasn't that far removed from those types of thoughts. Because on some level the total package does matter, of course, and on some level it's the clerics who are going to keep almost all the power, whatever the results of this election. And I wasn't at all certain that women's rights in Iran would be improved from their current level, whoever won the election.

But then she dies in front of my eyes and it doesn't matter how much I tell myself that people, women and men, are killed all the time for their political beliefs, all over this damn planet. She got butchered on the street, just like that, for demonstrating. And still the Iranian women go out there…

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