What photo to choose here from DKos's Library? This one or the one actually showing Emmett Till's deformed face?
Is it time to start confronting the public with images from school shootings?
When Mamie Till-Mobley witnessed the condition her son Emmett’s dead body was left, she made the courageous decision to have an open casket at the funeral and release post-humous photos of him. In the article linked to, Civil Rights leaders such as Rosa Parks and John Lewis inspired them to join the movement.
Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, wanted the world to see “what they did to my baby.”
His body looked monstrous, as if the 14-year-old had absorbed every blow of hate delivered by his killers — a photograph that ran in Jet magazine and many other African-American publications, but never appeared in the nation’s mainstream publications.
As a result, many Americans have never seen the photograph.
It is time the world did, his family members say.
snip
“We were the Emmett Till Generation,” said civil rights pioneer Dorie Ladner.
A year younger than Till, she remembers seeing the photograph and feeling his pain, she said.
That pain deepened when she saw a photograph of two of the killers, J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, laughing after the all-white jury acquitted them, she said.
“It just destroyed me,” she recalled. “You know what brought me relief? I got in the struggle.”
www.meridianstar.com/...
I came across some journalists discussing this reluctance to force America to look at what our society allows to happen on a regular, normalized basis. Yes, some on the right will try the ‘staged’ conspiracy nonsense but perhaps enough of us will become more active in changing things if we are forced to witness the carnage.
In Japan, there is a tv program called “Old Enough/My First Errand”. It features a family sending their young child out alone to do some shopping for their first time. A lot of prep goes into episode. Routes inspected, neighbors informed, the child is interviewed first and then accompanied by photographers. While the show features very young kids, the reality is that Japanese families do allow children to go out into their neighborhoods at a much younger age than is acceptable here in the USA.
The reason for mentioning this is to point out that Japan has built a society and planned communities where children are safe to go outside. It is a collective decision. Unfortunately, the USA has made a -collective- decision to allow children to be unsafe everywhere.
Republicans in Congress and in Governorships use easy access to guns of all types as part of their Culture War/Death Cult. Perhaps if they were no longer able to avoid graphic evidence of what their sociopathic choices are doing to children and families a critical mass would form and finally yield some progress.
“In Japan, many kids go to neighborhood schools on foot and by themselves, that’s quite typical,” said Hironori Kato, a professor of transportation planning at the University of Tokyo. Typically, Japanese children don’t actually run errands for Mom and Dad in the city at 2 or 3 years old, he notes, as they do in the show. But the comic, TV-friendly premise exaggerates a truth about Japanese society: Children in Japan have an unusual degree of independence from an early age.
“Roads and street networks are designed for kids to walk in a safe manner,” Kato said. Among the factors, he said: Drivers in Japan are taught to yield to pedestrians. Speed limits are low. Neighborhoods have small blocks with lots of intersections. That means kids have to cross the street a lot—but also keeps drivers going slow, out of self-interest if nothing else.
The streets themselves are also different. Many small streets do not have raised sidewalks but depend on pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers to share the road. Curbside parking is rare, which creates better visibility for drivers and pedestrians and helps give the smaller streets of big Japanese cities their distinctive feel. In fact, I first heard about Hajimete no otsukai from Rebecca Clements, a research fellow at the University of Sydney who has written a dissertation on Japan’s approach to parking: Car-buyers must show proof of an off-street parking space to make their purchase. For Clements, the show is evidence of how Japan gives children a “right to the city.”
slate.com/...
