Zimbardo

When it comes to my thoughts on the war in Iraq I usually stay pretty quiet. The majority of my family and friends are in agreement and we have our little discussions every now and then, but for the most part, I live in a very republican state and my views can cause a lot of confrontation. We had a patron come in yesterday who wanted to speak to our director concerning an issue that arose during a dinner party she attended. Apparently the dinner conversation was very focused on political issues and current events and through various discussions this lady discovered that she was the only Democrat among them. I guess another lady in the group was such a strong Republican that she swore she would have no problem checking out every book in the library that was left wing, democrat or liberal, and not return it. Our patron was concerned and wondered if there was anyway we could prevent this from happening. Obviously, there isn’t. She can check them out, keep them. We can charge her for the books and if she doesn’t pay then we can send it to a collection agency. If she pays, that’s good because then we have money to buy the books again. If not, well, we’ll have to dig into our budget and re-order.
Up until now I’ve been able to stomach most of the war. We don’t have cable so we don’t get CNN but I manage to keep up most of the time through the internet and the newpapers that come into our library. I also have to thank my brother who is much better and keeping up and sends me anything he feels is important to know. He sent me the slide show from the New York Times showing the abuse of Iraqi prisoners about a week ago and I’m afraid that was a bit too much for me to take. One of the reasons I don’t want t.v. is so I’m not constantly exposed to these images because they affect me so much (that’s why I don’t like horror movies). Besides, my imagination does a well enough job most of the time anyway. But, I haven’t been able to escape those visuals these past view days. With Katherine gone, I’m in charge of checking in mail and almost every newspaper has got those pictures spread over the front page. The execution of Nick Berg hits a little close to home since he apparently attended the same university I am now before he transferred to Cornell. Not that it should make a difference but it just feels closer for some reason. Maybe it’s because his interests and personality remind me a little of Mitch. The fact that he attended several different universities so he could get four different degrees and traveled around the world wanting to make a difference and to help people. So, needless to say, all of this and the recent events at work have left me feeling rather hopeless. My mortality has once again been thrown in my face and the cruelity of our kind has left me questioning my own existance.
For the most part, I don’t really understand why Americans are so shocked by the abuse. I find the response to be rather naive. Besides the glory and the patriotism, I’m not sure what kind of perception our nation has of war but it’s obviously not a realistic one. I’m not sure what made them think our soldiers would be immune to the savage affects of war. These people are surrounded by death and brutality everyday, they watch they’re friends ripped apart by bullets, burned alive and who knows what else. Not to mention they are in a foreign country, immersing themselves in a foreign culture that most of them know nothing about and conversing with people who speak a completely different language. Maybe everyone thinks we’ve “come a long way since Vietnam”, that things are different now because we’ve supposedly developed ways to have a “peaceful” war. War is war. Liberator’s, enemies, emancipators, antagonists, friend, foe. It makes no difference. We’re all the same. Don’t they get it?
I read a USA Today article that had an interview with a well known Stanford psychology professor by the name of Zimbardo. He apparently conducted a semi-secret experiment back in the 70’s. He set up a “mock prison” situation in his basement, hiring people to play prisoners and soldiers. His instructions to the soldiers were very vague and he left them there for about 6 days, observing them, before they started to exhibit some very disturbing behavior. This kind of experiment would be unheard of nowadays. Anyway, the results are rather interesting and were remarkably similar to the situation with the Iraqi prisoners. I’ve never really given experiments like this much merit just because no matter what you do they are still “controlled” in some way and there are always other external factors affecting the situation. But it was still interesting. You can read about it on Zimbardo’s website.