Death and (In-)Dignity

I went to Barney’s funeral on Saturday. I did not know Barney, but his widow is the president of my writers’ club and I wanted to express my sympathy to her.

It was a very dignified affair. The evening before, at “visitation”, members of the U.S. Marine Corps had come to pay their respects (Barney had fought in World War II in Europe, a member of “The Greatest Generation”, in Tom Brokaw’s words), and on Saturday, the Marine Corps emblem inside the coffin’s lid, the pin on the deceased’s lapel and the American flag draped over the coffin’s bottom half all contributed to the sense of gratitude and joy Barney’s family must have felt for a long, well-lived life. It was a funeral cloaked in dignity.

Yesterday evening, on TV, there was the stark indignity of images from Haiti, with earth-moving equipment removing scattered bodies from the streets of Port-au-Prince. Limbs hanging out of large steel scoops before being dumped into trucks that would proceed to mass-grave, no-name burials.

It’s understandable that this has to be done, but does it have to be shown on television?

The United States is this hemisphere’s richest country and Haiti its poorest. Should a devastating earthquake, God forbid, strike an American city of equal size and population, is this what we would see on the evening news? Has our society become so insensitive that disaster victims are nothing more than this week’s trash? Or does being poor, black and dead bring with it an automatic deprivation of dignity? I wonder.

Earthquake in Haiti; when News becomes Voyeurism

I do not need to see any more images of dead Haitians.

Yes, the earthquake has been terrible, hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost or impacted. A country that never had much going for itself lies in ruin. But television newscasts that are ¾ filled with news from Haiti, with anchors Katie Couric, Brian Williams and Diane Sawyer on the ground in Port-au-Prince, accompanied by dozens of reporters and support staff and tons of equipment, are too much.

How is it that during the previous U.S. administration we were not even allowed to see flag-draped coffins of soldiers killed in Iraq arriving at Dover Air Force Base, but now we are served endless rows of twisted, mangled, bloated bodies on the streets of a Caribbean island on the evening news (not to mention the morning news and the midday news and the evening entertainment programs)?

This is too much. It is not necessary. The disaster struck. The recovery is going to be a Herculean task. Four hundred million dollars in relief aid has already been gathered or promised. And life goes on. Or not.