"It is surprising how little of the actual carnage we see…in clear contrast to reporting on third world catastrophes… The real horror happens there, not here." (Zizek 232) In class we looked at this quote in a more personal perspective. Think about all of the terrible things that are constantly flooding headlines, especially international occurrences. My thought process is almost always empathetic of those dealing with negative situations, yet it always feels foreign and there's no strong emotional connection in all actuality. It's comparable in some context to the ideology most people hold that "it will never happen to me". Someone brought up a good example that even when hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, if you weren't within the vicinity affected you never truly connected personally, even though it was right here in our very own country. I think Americans especially have a superiority complex that allows us to be somewhat exempt in our minds from things the rest of the world suffers from. Here's a video documenting the tsunami that happened -- even watching this now it seems so far out there and I can't grasp the fact that people experienced this natural disaster.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9DMiy_DVok
Another quote I found to be interesting was "the terrorists themselves did not do it primarily to provoke real material damage, but for the spectacular effect of it", talking about 9/11 and the attack on the world trade centers. The fact that the two towers fell was just a plus for the terrorists on that day. I found this to be so interesting because it's a perspective I've never looked from until this reading. It was a show the terrorists wanted to put on not the fact that people would be dying, but more so the fact that a huge landmark of the American culture was being tainted by outside forces.
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