Originally Posted by
stevef
Reasonable assessment.
I saw a couple of nasty fatals when I was younger (aircraft and RTA) and they stayed with me for a long time. These days I'm not affected when I see Ukrainian war deaths on the various media, such as the Russian soldier being shot to death through the outhouse door, others grenaded by drones or blown out of the sky in their helicopters.. It's probably because they're considered the bad guys. Overspill from the entertainment world ... sounds awful, doesn't it ...
The first violent death body I saw was the pilot of an A/C that had crashed shortly after take off. That vivid memory has never left me. Before that I had no idea just what a very violent death looked like, the only dead person I'd seen was my father, who died peacefully after a long illness. He just looked as if he was asleep, and that was how I thought of death for years. I had no concept of the effect violent forces had on the body in reality, even now, 50 years later, I still remember that young pilot no longer having a face. Some of the photos from Ukraine have brought that back, especially the image in
NutLoose 's post #12431 above. That brought it all back with a vengeance when I saw it, I'm not ashamed to say I openly wept about it again when seeing that, for the first time in years.
I can understand video games and screens making war and violence seem impersonal and unreal. However, I can also remember being pretty much forced to watch some road safety films in the station cinema in the 1970', produced (I think) by an American police force. They had taken cameras out to the scene of major road accidents, and filmed the horror of those accidents. Most involved young men, like us, and most involved drinking. Two images from those films stick with me to this day. The bloodied remains of a headless torso that had been forced up through the roof of a car, and a still alive young man on the ground, missing both legs, screaming and grasping at the grass around him. These films were shocking, so much so that some left the cinema to chuck up. They were effective. Despite being a reckless and irresponsible young man, I never drank alcohol if there was any chance I might need to drive a car.
Perhaps we need shock tactics to convince young people that war is not a video game.