I’ve got a lot of work to do and I realize this kind of historical reflection is often (willfully) misinterpreted (just ask President Obama), but for some reason I feel the need to get this off my chest.
The burning alive of that Jordanian pilot by ISIL was barbaric, but to hear the anchors and talk-show hosts going on about it, you’d think it was unprecedented, unique, a new chapter in the history of horror. But look at the photo below. It isn’t even Alabama or Mississippi, for God’s sake. It’s Omaha, Nebraska. And while it was a while ago, in 1919, that’s not so terrbily long ago, either. It’s the year my father was born.
You say the horror of the ISIL killing was that they videotaped it? Look at the faces in the crowd. Give those guys an iPhone and every damned one of them would have posted it on YouTube. And then spend three minutes Googling and you’ll find dozens of photos of similar lynchings and burnings, attended by scores of young children, cute little boys and girls taken by their parents to watch something like that. A certain portion of any population is always poised to go barbaric. All they need is the right spark.
Ed Kemmick lives in Billings, Montana and edits LastBestNews.com.
