From Ethiopia to Bosnia, from...
Illustration
From Ethiopia to Bosnia, from Rwanda to South Africa, from the South Bronx to Watts, in one lifetime the Baby Boomers of the United States have witnessed, long distance, the destruction of cities and entire nations in the fashion foreseen by Jeremiah for Jerusalem. And yet, there is no way that we can experience this devastation via television.
Tipper Gore, speaking to the American people from the midst of the suffering Rwandans in refugee camps in the summer of 1994 said, "Television cannot begin to capture what the depth of suffering is here. You cannot take it in --the death, disease, pain and suffering that this camp represents, and this is only one camp out of many. It is beyond human comprehension, and you can only see it in bits and pieces. Now, being here, I am overwhelmed with the awfulness of it all."
Even when the pictures break through with some small snippet of suffering that we can comprehend, unless we have seen Beirut when it was beautiful and the Holiday Inn was not a battleground, we cannot really understand what destruction has been wrought by war. Unless we understand the long history of Ethiopia and the depth and breadth of civilization and art that has been reduced to children starving in the dust, we can never lament the way Jeremiah does over the destruction of Jerusalem. To realize the depth of loss, we must have known the heights to which a people have scaled, and from which they have been toppled.
- Herrmann
Tipper Gore, speaking to the American people from the midst of the suffering Rwandans in refugee camps in the summer of 1994 said, "Television cannot begin to capture what the depth of suffering is here. You cannot take it in --the death, disease, pain and suffering that this camp represents, and this is only one camp out of many. It is beyond human comprehension, and you can only see it in bits and pieces. Now, being here, I am overwhelmed with the awfulness of it all."
Even when the pictures break through with some small snippet of suffering that we can comprehend, unless we have seen Beirut when it was beautiful and the Holiday Inn was not a battleground, we cannot really understand what destruction has been wrought by war. Unless we understand the long history of Ethiopia and the depth and breadth of civilization and art that has been reduced to children starving in the dust, we can never lament the way Jeremiah does over the destruction of Jerusalem. To realize the depth of loss, we must have known the heights to which a people have scaled, and from which they have been toppled.
- Herrmann
