Hey readers,

Lately my ASTU class has been reading a lot of writing based around the “war on terror”. Many of the works, such as Judith Butler’s Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? highlight the distinction that such occurrences have made between “us” and “them”, “good” and “evil”. Evidence will often point to the acts of the United States against the Middle East after the terrorist attack on 9/11 as the starting point of these assertions. Many scholars have even referred to our era as the “post 9/11 world”. What Judith Butler asserts is that these acts have shaped our idea as humans of who we should grieve for, and not grieve for, whose lives are valuable and whose aren’t. I agree with Butler on this manner, and believe that our reactions have been expertly crafted from decades of assigning emotions to certain news stories: sadness at the death of our soldiers, fear at the sight of a war scene, and relief at the death of an enemy. Recently the media instilled sadness in the public using the picture of the little refugee boy, Alan Kurdi, who washed up on shore. He represented the loss of innocent life, however, we were still meant to feel threatened by the mass volume of syrian refugees seeking safety in our countries. We are meant to mourn the life of the one little boy who was on his way to safety, but not the lives of the thousands of civilians who died in the war zones that they were escaping.

In the first chapter of her book, Judith Butler describes in great detail the process through which we as a society decide which lives are worth grieving for and which ones are not. On page 51 Butler states “It is only by challenging the dominant media that certain kinds of lives may become visible or knowable in their precariousness” meaning that currently the media is determining which lives we find worthy or unworthy, as Butler puts it quite poetically ” The tactic interpretive scheme that divides worthy from unworthy lives works fundamentally through the senses, differentiating the cries we hear from those we cannot, and likewise the level of touch and even smell.”(51). We cannot properly grieve for people we have never known or been introduced to, people who have been characterized as unlike us. What Butler is saying is that we mourn for the cries we can hear, the cries that are shown to us BY the media, and represented as “like us”. This represents a problem which I believe needs to be more publicly addressed: the problem of picking and choosing which lives hold more value than others. If we go off of the standards shown, then who is to say that our lives aren’t worthless to those we perceive as “others”?

The chapter that we read of Judith Butler’s book gave me a lot to think about, and left me with many more questions than answers. I look forward to reading and learning more!

Till next time,

Mia Spare