How Will Americans Remember the War in Gaza?

There is also a moral element to this whole attention-grabbing fear campaign. How long can we, as a people, really care about an atrocity? How does the relative duration of our haunting reflect our collective moral strengths and weaknesses?

In that previous Kirk article, I asked what Kent State would look like in 2025. A single photo from the day in 1970 when four students were killed by the Ohio National Guard is so powerful that every time I hear about Kent State — its basketball team or its engineering program — the image comes to mind. I’m sure I’m not alone. Can the public still articulate itself in this way around a single image of a disaster? Or, today, would we all see hundreds of chaotic photos taken with cell phone cameras by people at the scene and uploaded directly to their feeds? Kent State was reduced to a single photo because the press was much more centralized at the time and had the power and influence to edit, organize and promote a particular version of an event.

The media still strives to get our attention in this way. As the war in Gaza reached the end of its first year, several major media outlets published collections of images that they believed were representative of the tragedy experienced thus far. Others were published after two years. I’m guessing you haven’t noticed these compilations, and I’m pretty sure you have no idea which specific photos were put together.

What images from the war in Gaza will you never forget? A photograph of six dead children hidden under a sheet? Images of a father staggering, apparently carrying the headless body of his baby? Photos of the bloody aftermath in kibbutz kitchens? Do you know what images I’m referring to? Do you have your own list of images I will need for Google? And, even if we are both horrified by the carnage, does the fact that we all have our personalized horror movie mean that we will more quickly forget what we saw, because our memories will not be refreshed by the repetition of a singular image? Will we trust our memories less, because we are no longer sure that the photos and even videos we see are real?

I don’t worry about my children’s attention span. But I worry about what happens when every image becomes a site of contestation; when the rare sights we all see together, whether joyous or devastating, quickly unravel into thousands, even millions of threads, each with its own grip on reality. When historians look back on our times, they will discover atrocities that have been documented in more detail than at any other time in history; they will see thousands of corpses; and they will find millions of hours of comments. What they won’t find is a coherent narrative describing these images as they occurred. Of course, consensus about how and why things happen can be used to exert terrible will, and perhaps there could be some potential good to be had from all this chaos. But how can we build a community when no one can have a vision, or even an interpretation, of what happened in common?

To complete the thought, Kent State might not be remembered without the anchor of this single photograph. When we say that the public can no longer remember anything due to shortened attention spans or whatever, what we are really describing, at least in large part, is the lack of collective memory, shaped by iconic images that bind us. It is a lament of those who are alone: ​​those who understand that a new, unctuous consciousness is being born – one that shapes the way their children perceive the suffering world – but cannot understand what it looks like. ♦