Respons to Sontag "Regarding the Pain of Others"

I believe the main point Sontag is trying to make in Ch.5 is that we as humans have an innate attraction to look at the pain and suffering of others, and the more exposure we have to such images leads us to become numb to what they really are showing. The easiest pictures of pain to look at are ones in which the person suffering is not close to you. Sontag describes a Sarajevo women who was watching the news of war a couple hundred miles away from where she lived. She thought to herself "Oh, how horrible," and switched the channel. Sontag makes the point that, "Whenever people feel safe, they will be indifferent" (100). So when people in the U.S. are watching news on the war in Iraq, many people do just as this women did; they think "oh, how horrible, " and switch the channel. Here Sontag is showing that "People can turn off [t.v.] not just because a steady diet of images of violence has made them indifferent but because they are afraid" (100). This women was a couple hundred miles away from the war and couldn't deal with this fact. And like this women, every day normal citizens around the world accept the fact that a war "doesn't seem as if it can be stopped- so people become less responsive to the horrors" (101). When people believe there is no hope, that is when there is more pain and suffering is happening, because no one will take the time to put in any effort to stop these horrible events for occurring.

In Ch.8 Sontag states that the vital function of war photographs are to say: "This is what human beings are capable of doing- may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self-righteously. Don't forget" (115). To often we forget all of the fighting going on in the world in our everyday lives. Sontag urges that "To make peace is to forget" (115). She is arguing that in order for us to feel peace, we must forget the horrible images of war. As humans we need to feel peace in our lives, so "it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited" (115).

The last statement Sontag argues is that "We don't get it. We truly can't imagine what it was like. We can't imagine how dreadful, how terrifying is; and how normal it becomes" (125-126). Her last point here is that no matter how many photographs a person sees of war, they will never be truly be able to understand or feel what happened in the picture. A picture is still just a just a memory and representation of a past event. One looking at the photo cannot truly experience what happened just by looking at a photo. They would have had to be there.