“What a load of crap, this notion of making the university a safe place. Think of all the wonderful things in life that could never have happened — all the great things that would never have been created or discovered or even imagined — if the top priority had been to make everyone feel safe. Who’d want to live in such a world?”
--from Sigrid Nuñez’s The Friend
This past March 7 was the sixtieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the day in 1965 when Alabama state troopers on horseback mowed down peaceful, stationary protesters who had come to march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge to demand the right to vote. Among the injured was future Congressman John Lewis who, among other injuries, sustained a fractured skull as a result of a trooper’s billy club to his head.
In those days when the transmission of news footage was not instantaneous, most American didn’t actually see this secessionist pogrom until that evening when the three major networks interrupted their prime-time programming to show it. In an irony noted many times since, ABC interrupted a showing of Judgment at Nuremberg, a drama about the prosecution of Nazi war crimes, and here was their contemporary American correlative busting in
If this juxtaposition had occurred today, two things would have happened: viewers would have been warned that the news footage they were about to see was potentially upsetting, and when the network returned to the movie, viewers would have been warned again that the film they were about to watch was also potentially upsetting.
I want to be clear about this: relating news that an American state had unleashed a coordinated and vicious racist attack on its inhabitants—as well as broadcasting a drama about similar crimes then little more than twenty years in the past—would be considered less important than making sure no one watching got upset.
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