Sensitive Content

by Sam Thielman

This was on a Thursday. What I saw was the top half of a video clip that a search for “Gaza” returned on X, the site formerly known as Twitter. Consider that your content warning. There wasn’t much in the news about the war because of the Democratic National Convention, so against my usual judgment, I was checking X. 

The footage was of a man holding… something. Cradling it. In his arms. Textures blend together in digital video because of the way the photos are encoded and decoded. But these technologies have gotten better—less noticeably “lossy,” if you want the old-fashioned technical term—in recent years. Everything is very vivid now.

I could see the item or entity was loose and disconnected. The word I keep wanting to use is floppy. It was not the right structure for a child, but again, the man was cradling it as if it was still a child, gently supporting it. 

People always describe the effect of bombs as turning people to meat, but that’s not right, is it? Meat is neatly dressed and butchered and treated with care. Subsistence hunters respect the animals they prey on. My wife’s niece hunts deer sometimes; she makes her own venison sausage and brings it home for Christmas. She loves animals; she used to have a pet pigeon and has always had a dog or a cat or two around. She would never treat an animal she planned to eat the way someone had treated that little child, ruining it.