The Terminal: Crisis in Krakozhia

I just watched "The Terminal", a movie starring Tom Hanks about a guy who gets trapped in an airport when his country, Krakozhia, is destroyed by warfare. It's a great film, but that's not what this post is about.

There's an extremely poignant scene in the first part of the movie where Tom Hanks is in the airport, and he sees on the televisions distributed around the airport a CNN news broadcast about a "Crisis in Krakozhia". He's shocked, terrified and scared at the pictures of war and terror descending on his country, and nobody around him even gives a glance at the news. Who hasn't changed the channel when the news comes on and it's about some war somewhere?

Imagine this: you're in the international airport in Geneva waiting for your flight back when the news comes on one of the screens: your home country has been invaded. The television shows the Statue of Liberty, or Buckhingham Palace, or the Sydney Harbor Bridge collapsing. A shot of tanks moving down your street. Militants firing in the streets. And everybody else just walks past the television, ignoring it. How do you think you would feel?

There's far too much apathy in our society, and the news is too "clean". After seeing the "clean" pictures of the Iraq war in America and on the commercial networks over here, it was quite a shock to flip to SBS and see dead people in the streets, Coalition troops shooting and killing innocent people who don't even look like a threat, and people climbing through the rubble, searching for their loved ones. That is what happens in war. It's not clean, it's not a video game and it's not a matter of good and evil. Think about how you would feel if your family was killed by a bomb from a plane sent to liberate you. How much freedom is your family worth?