You don't learn anything from the bang bang.

War stories are funny things really. We always want a moral. We want a point - we want some little kernel of "truth" to take away from the atrocity. Of course, that isn't what we truly want. We want to make sense of the senseless. We want to walk away with something that makes us feel better. We want, "oh that's terrible... but there's that silver lining." Most times there simply isn't one. We look to pithy expressions such as, "war is hell" and everyone nods in agreement. Yes, war is hell but there is so much more to it than that. Real war stories don't have a point. There is no moral to the story. They leave you with a profound"what the fuck" sensation, and that's how you know a real war story. If you walk away feeling uplifted, or positive, or anything other than confused and or dejected it wasn't a real war story. Because you can tell a real war story that never happened and be closer to the truth than you could ever hope to be in telling a war story that did happen. It boils down to the essence of truth. Reality rarely has much to do with truth. As someone who has spent what probably amounts to weeks, if not months, of her life looking at photographs of incomprehensible atrocities perpetrated by man against his fellow man, I still don't know how I'm meant to respond. There's a crisis in humanitarianism right now. We want Innocent Victims.We want people we can point to and say that these people are deserving of our help because they are Innocent. Innocence. Mm. It's a funny thing really because the one thing a totalitarian tyrant and a humanitarian have in common is that they both like being photographed with children. There's this mentality that if we portray people as Innocents - children really - ignoring entirely the fact that, in these crazy times in which we live, today's victims are tomorrow's perpetrators and today's perpetrators are often tomorrow's victims... that these people have political inclinations, they have thoughts and opinions and often act upon those opinions, we can foster a feeling of warm and fuzzy do-goodyness in the collective western mind. What I know is this: You don't learn anything from the bang bang baby. Not a damn thing.