Haunting imagery

Ron Nessen, Press Secretary during the Ford Administration, mentioned in “Making the News Taking the News” that a Vietnamese lady holding her battered child in front of the camera, begging public opinion to do something. A sense of helplessness stayed with him for years to come,

Other images from the last days of Saigon showing young men in rifles riding on the hood of Jeeps, very Kabul-like. Victor and vanquished e.g. announcing American involvement in 65, only to pull out in 75 (Ford was playing golf in Palm Springs, while SVN troops were pulling out in China Beach, in opposite direction from a decade earlier).

We, survivors of calamity, natural or man-made. rebuild lives after hurricanes and typhoon, long Covid or war aftermath.

But I can’t forget images of India ran out of materials for burnt burials.

Or those refrigerated containers in the backyard of a San Antonio morgue.

Memories favor the visual: man on the Moon, Million-Man March or the Last Chopper out.

Mine is more auditory: the chilling whoops whoops of a fast approaching blade (came loosed from a miss-landing chopper).

Haunting sound.

Ron Nessen recounted a joke, Kissinger’s, that if he had had a third title – besides NSA Chief and Sec of State, he would have lost a third country in one month ( Cambodia and Vietnam +).

Haunting images of pushing and shoving, dropping of babies and displaying of babies for the camera, supposedly for network TV viewership and world opinion. Meanwhile, leaders still play golf, people from afar are still dying, 24/7 via YouTube.

At least Ford exercised some moral leadership: flying from Palm Springs to San Francisco to greet the Baby Lift flight (the surviving Amerasian) and helped volunteers to dislodge orphans after their seat-less/restless trans-Pacific flight from Saigon.

Holding a half-breed baby as if it were a prized football, Wolverine number 48 (38th President) unconsciously rehashed his Michigan football days. That is compassion, decency and humanity – not playing golf and holding a copy of the Bible as prop.

I am not a survivor of Jewish camps during WWII. But I know hundreds of heart-wrenching as well as heart-warming images. Are we better off than 80 years ago? 50 years ago? Or the world keeps rotating its poor leadership, changing of the guards without changing the script? (Business as usual for the news cycle and public consumption).

Being a person or being a professional journalist?

Haunting imagery are still with us, at times, triggered sudden crying for no reason (Ron Nessen did) just like I on my first day of school. It’s contagious when the whole room cry, knowing the road is long, and either we must carry others, or ourselves be carried.

Each day we are closer to the end than the beginning. Life in and of itself is haunting – visual and auditory, baptism or burial. The antidote? Balance it with feelers e.g. heart-warming imagery and keepsake memory. I will leave that to Chevy Chase and comedians whose materials often are more engaging and enlightening than politician’s.