Rant #2,427: Video!

I said in a previous Rant that I was not going to talk about the George Floyd protests anymore unless there was a reason to do so, and I am sticking with that stance.

Everyone reading this blog knows my stance, and you can agree with me or disagree with me, and that is all fine with me.

But I would like to talk today about what helped spur on this movement, for a lack of a better term, and it is video--and it is far from a new phenomenon to spur change.

The video of Floyd being accosted by the Minneapolis police officer was shot by a teenager wielding a tool that has become more powerful as its use has become more widespread and available to just about anyone, and that is a cellphone.

A push of a few buttons can have us record history, and within seconds, that recorded history can be posted and seen by millions of people around the world.

Even though we call it a "cellphone," it really is more a "picturephone," because its main use today appears to be taking pictures and recording video, right on the spot.

And as opposed to cumbersome cameras of earlier time periods, heck, you just take this thing out of your pocket, go into your photo app, and away you go!

But as with all video, you see what the camera sees, so the camera in the cellphone misses things when it is not on and recording. That is the one fallacy of the entire cellphone/picturephone thing, that under most circumstances, the video only shows a portion of what you are seeing; sometimes, the potion that is missing is key to understanding why what was recorded happened.

And no, don't jump to conclusions, I am not saying that is what happened in the Floyd case. But it is certainly what has happened in other related cases, where action by police against supposedly innocent people only captures the cop's reaction to previous aggression, and not the initial couple of seconds that would have explained plenty about why the officer acted like he did.

Yes, it is handy to have these cellphones in our pocket and ready to go at a split-moment's notice, but video, and what we see in the video, has shaped our nation's conscience before 2020.

Sure, cellphones were not around 50 years ago, but cameras were, and they helped shaped our perception of war and made the Vietnam War--and its participants--pariahs for decades.

We had been in other wars in the 20th century, whether you are talking about World Wars I and II or the Korean War. But the Vietnam War was the first war that came right into our households, showing the brutality of war to us right in our living rooms.

In prior wars, we heard about the horror and brutality of these conflicts, but they were never placed right on our doorsteps like the Vietnam War was.

Radio was great in its reporting of the other wars, but visuals really capture the essence of what is going on. Radio is really a thinking man's medium, because you hear what is said, and you have to process it through your brain to fully understand what is being said.

With video--and primarily television--you see what was filmed, and it immediately hits you between the eyes. The processing point is so much less than that of the spoken word.

So with the advent of television in households in the 1950s and going into the 1960s, we were able to see what was happening, with film almost allowing us to be an eyewitness to these events, as if we were standing right there with the soldiers.

The Vietnam War could not be sugarcoated with Abbott and Costello movies like World War II was. And that is not knocking the war effort at home at all. Those films galvanized a nation into patriotism against foreign powers that were looking to destroy our way of life, and they did just that.

Newsreels often showed what war was like, but again, television only started to make its mark in the late 1940s, a few years after World War II ended, so its impact was truly minimal in galvanizing the public to see what war was about.

And even during the Korean War, we as a culture did not yet understand the power of television, so its impact on that war was probably very minimal, simply because the technology was not there to capture the rigors of that war front and center.

But by the mid to late 1960s, the technology was there--both to record the horrors of war and to bring it into our living rooms night after night on the local and evening news, and we saw, often graphically, that war was not an Abbott and Costello movie, not by a long shot.

We saw the horrors of war each and every day on television, and for the first time, people, seeing what war was really all about, began to question why we were there and what we were doing.

It is pretty simplistic to say this, but the viewing of footage each and every day on our televisions certainly led to overall distrust of what we were doing overseas, and served to make the Vietnam War by far and away the most unpopular war in our nation's history.

Unfortunately, the collateral damage of all of this is that it made our brave service members pariahs of society for decades, mainly because of the actions of a few of them that were truly heinous.

These brave citizens were doing their duty to our country, but were often looked at as almost mercenaries for the common bad, the ugly American, and even when they came home, they were oten taunted and spit it. This was so different than those service members coming home from other wars, who were celebrated as the heroes that they truly were.

Vietnam vets were heroes, too, but we couldn't get our arms around what they did because of the visuals that we saw. It literally took decades for public perception to change, and in the interim, service members suffered, as they were shunned by the country that they served so gallantly.

And again, even in those times, the film footage that we saw didn't show everything, and could be shaped and painted based on our perceptions of what was going on, and what we felt was right, and what we felt was wrong.

Fast forward to 2020, and we are in almost the same situation, but now, everyone is a cameraman, everyone has the capacity to film what they see and film what pieces of things they want to see, and our brave police officers are in the crossfire just like our Vietnam vets were, with a few bad eggs painting the entire profession in a very negative way.

And again, all of this is spearheaded by images captured on video.

So what comes around goes around, and 50 years after film footage helped shape our mindset against the war, video footage is helping to shape our perceptions about what is wrong with out society.

I don't think Thomas Edison or any of the other early inventors and users of movies and video would ever have imagined that their little invention would change the world, but it certainly did.

It did during the 1960s, and it certainly has in 2020.