I only go to my local library on Poetry Writers Group day, every other Tuesday. That’s when I visit the free book section, and also when serendipity has a chance to show itself  This Tuesday it delivered to me Whatever Became of Sin?  by Karl Menninger, M.D., a book copyrighted in 1973.  I was drawn to his words on page 102 in the chapter on  Sin as Collective Responsibility:

“Most people never see the awfulness of war; they only read about it or hear about it from reporters or survivors.  War continues to be a deputized human activity; some citizens are sent out to do what the  total citizenry couldn’t and wouldn’t do.  The rest of us sit (or stand) a long ways off –and watch or listen, occasionally.  And we are so accustomed to receiving reports in prosaic words,  in statistics of “body count”  and bombing “missions” (sic)  and metaphorical phrases such as “punished,”  “cleaned up,”  “resistance met with,”  and “right on target” that the horror,  the awfulness, the reality of the total event become denatured.  The pain, the terror, he sorrow, the blood and filth and mud, and the loss of all that is loved that are squeezed out of the reports, leaving dry husks of unassimilatable  “facts” in endless heaps.

“The picture of one screaming, burning child or one half-dismembered or disemboweled  woman shocks and revolts us, although we are spared  the sounds of the screams and groans.  We are not witnesses to the brokenhearted mother’s sorrow.  We know nothing of the despair, the hopelessness, the loss of everything.  We don’t go with them into the hospitals and observe the hideous wounds, the agonizing burns, the shattered limbs.  And all this is one tiny dot on a great map of millions.  It cannot be described.  It cannot be grasped.  It cannot be imagined.”

He adds on the next page, “Why don’t we outlaw war,  just as we have long since outlawed cannibalism?  How infinitely more horrible it is than cannibalism, which so shocks our sensibilities.”

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Of course, with internet journalism we can and do witness more suffering.  I’m sort of glad the good doctor isn’t around to witness our imperviousness to it–by many, not all.

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