Journal Entry: "Students Shot In Front Of A Camera"

The video I discuss in this journal entry can be found here, which I found via The Daily Dish.

Response: The title of the video is simple and straightforward. People are crying out and throwing rocks. The camera is blurry and unclear at times. A lone woman's voice cries shortly before shots ring out at 1:07 in the video, gravely wounding at least one student in view, surely more are wounded off camera. It triggers a shockwave in me, as the woman yells piercingly.

I'm shocked. I can't understand why such a response comes from someone with the clear high ground, but physically and in weapon. Rocks in a crowd versus a riot policeman's gun? Where is the justice in that, when all they want is answers? I don't understand why they aren't allowed the answers they want, nor do I understand the amount of violent response. This is only a single video, unedited, and I wonder how they got it on YouTube. I can't understand what they're saying, but you can hear the emotion in their voices, especially what sounds like a woman's voice, after the shots are fired.

I've watched the video several times. Each time, I don't see the threat; I just see angry people, who are not nearly violent enough to deserve the response they are given. They respond angrily to the shots: one man hurls a rock in anger while simultaneously trying to move an injured man to the side with others. I wonder why this is happening.

Self-Critique: My shock at the video is very naïve. While I have known the riots are happening, and people are experiencing physical harm due to them, I had not been able to bring myself to watch a video of it until now. My equally naïve demand for justice seems hollow from my comfortable chair in my small apartment, where the worst I hear are sirens and revving engines.

I am reacting to this video with shock and a strong sense of injustice because I recognize how morally wrong it is, but also because I have never had to experience it personally, which somehow makes it worse in my view, despite being away that I possess a large amount of privilege (i.e. white). Although the government I have grown up with is certainly not without its problems or corruption, but it has not and I believe, perhaps naively, could not get away with what the Iranian government is currently doing to its citizens. I think that is perhaps even more naïve, given certain events in Canadian history.

I find it interesting that I seem to fixate on the single woman’s voice, due to its difference in tone around the mesh of male yelling. Perhaps I focus on the woman’s voice because I wonder if I could participate in such a riot, in such close proximity to shots – in danger of being shot at myself – and doubt that I have the courage. I also focus on the emotion in the woman’s voice directly after the shots are fired, as opposed to the harshness in the male voices reacting to the same event.

Cultural Critique: My responses in both my original response and self-critique reveal the dominant Canadian culture of detachment. By detaching ourselves from what is happening overseas, one is led to believe that it “couldn’t happen here,” or what I have heard referred to as “not in my backyard” syndrome. This belief, that things that happen in the seemingly mythical Mideast, Iraq, Iran, Afganhistan, etc., cannot happen in Canada, the United States, or other typically Western societies is not only naïve and ignorant, but also ignores the past of these societies, which has perpetrated similar crimes in the past towards its own citizens.

There is also the racist undertones in these beliefs; that only such savage, underdeveloped countries could commit such crimes, and the barbarism of the shootings are amplified in the media to such an extent that it becomes as mythical as Western society’s views of the Mideast itself.

Western society, its media and government enjoy preserving and sensationalizing the negative point of view of the Mideast and its society, for it helps its own society to forget the similar horrors it has committed in its past.