War, games, sports, Ukraine

In this week’s post, I had planned to continue my discussion of nature, cities, and vitality but I have to tell you that it’s very difficult at the moment to concentrate on anything other than the carnage that is taking place in Ukraine, so I’m going to give in to that pre-occupation.

Like most of the world, it seems, I am repulsed by the daily accounts of the death and destruction that is being rained on this beleaguered state and I’m blue in the face with frustration at the thought that a regime in Russia is able to inflict such suffering while the rest of world looks on, powerless to bring an immediate halt to the invasion. I’m not going to wade into areas where I have no expertise. Though I have opinions, global geopolitics is not my field and I have no desire to contribute to misinformed confusion.

What does concern me though (and again, “concern” seems like such a trivial milquetoast word in this context) is how we in the West are experiencing this horrifying event. Each morning I wake up, tune in to about six different mainstream media channels to see what new horrors have been inflicted. Truth be told, I’m not sleeping very well these days, so the media check-ins are more likely to be sprinkled through my normal sleeping hours too. I’m struck by banner headings on some of these outlets (BBC, CNN, probably a few others as well) with titles like “Day 11 of the Russia-Ukraine War.” Falling hard astern of the recently completed Winter Olympics in Beijing (which some reports have suggested may have motivated Putin to postpone the start of the invasion), the connection both struck and disturbed me. Are we sportifying the war? The images and sounds that come to us via our computers, phones and televisions are brutal, visceral, and disturbing but in the way of all such media, they are not real. I experience an exploding apartment building from the warmth of my bed. My pulse goes up, my pupils dilate, my blood pressure increases, but all of these things can also happen during an attack in World of Warcraft or a shootout in Red Dead Redemption.

There’s no getting around these kinds of effects and indeed the brave reporters who risk their lives to bring these images to us deserve nothing but our admiration and praise. And in some ways, this is nothing new. I remember watching scrolling charts and visualizations during Operation Desert Storm, which kept a running tally of successes and failures. I even remember televised newscasts from my childhood that were routinely prefaced with an announcement of the daily and cumulative death count for American soldiers during the Vietnam War. Things now feel different. Full-on digital everything assaults our senses for a while but eventually, perhaps as an adaptive response, we become inured. We turn away. We forget. We go on. And like almost all of modern life, it seems, we carry on with the enterprise of slipping digital simulacra in place of the real. Everything becomes a game played on screens. The real blood, shed far away, pales into insignificance, not even as real to us as an NFT. I fear this.

I think of an event I attended years ago in Stockholm. It was an urban planning conference, oddly enough, whose theme was connected with the housing and wellbeing of refugees. One presenter, an academic from Syria, showed us photos of the destruction of his homeland. The images were not new. We had all seen photos of the destruction of Aleppo. But hearing a first-person account from a man who was actually in the room with us made all the difference. Other than his voice, the room was as silent as a tomb. Nobody fiddled with their phone. All eyes were latched on the speaker. After his presentation, we filed out of the room in throat-clenched silence.  If there is a moral here it is this: for all of our space-bending technology, our miraculous minds, our dizzying accomplishments, life is rooted in the body. To understand and empathize in its fullest sense, I need to share the space you inhabit, the air you breathe, and your beating pulse. I don’t want to give up my phone, my tablet, my television as portals of information, but let’s not forget that these devices offer dim reflections of the vitality of life in all of its wonder, glory and, yes, horror.