Dear Monster,
Recently, I found an old acquaintance on liveleak.com internet news site. He and I
both worked as Critical Care Nurses at Mt. Zion in San Francisco while taking leave
from the country to travel. His mountain climbing of Everest and other peaks left
him wanting to live and work in a rural place in Afghanistan.
After he became famous for having written a book about the decade he spent in a
rural area near Warizstan, I saw him on various cable news programs trying to build
support for certain types of humanitarian development.
I wondered out loud if this type of publicity actually causes more harm than good
for those he served. Frequently, there is an exoticizing of foreign efforts for children
even if those efforts are well-conceived. I wondered also if he had experienced some
type of pressure to create public relations statements based on those who provided
him this profit-making opportunity.
News systems, in particular those that exoticize foreign cultures and peoples can
be one of the worst types of exploitation known in modern culture. Think about the
impact of a hurried and opportunistic venture to influence the hearts and minds of
a completely different nation that is seeped in its own conflicts of tradition.
I would not want any liveleak.com broadcast on any activity deemed to be for the
sake of humanity given what we know to be profit interests in news media, however,
in a case where war conflicts are being actualized without real coverage by the main-
stream press, maybe his example led to saving lives. It's difficult to know really.
Voyeurism is not human nature. It is a perverse form of control for those who see
that others are without their own presence in modernity. This perversity may be
the root of why the prevalence of surveillance equipment/technology in the public
is more like a gambling enterprise in that it inspires the worst of human nature.
fernie
