Reframing What Is Forgotten

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However, people often fail to see things from a perspective other than society’s default. “But when we talk about violence, we almost always talk about violence from below, not above,” Solnit laments (759). This is what people are missing about climate change and it does not sit right with Solnit. Similarly, Berger comments on the fact that people in the West become self-defensive when discussing the bombing, which ignores the inherent evil in the act and in the treatment of survivors. “One of evil’s principal modes of being is looking beyond (with indifference) that which is before the eyes,” as Berger puts it (295). Just as Solnit said, society often looks at or considers the wrong interpretation of reality or the wrong issue. The change in language, whether calling climate change violence or the bombing evil, can fix this view. Solnit herself explains this in saying, “Because the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality” (761). In other words, people cannot come to terms with an issue without first understanding the very terms, literally, that describe it. Solnit writes this in the context of exposing the perpetrators of climate change, but it also applies to the West in the context of the way people speak about the bombings and thus clarifies what Berger is trying to say. He himself explains the opposite side of that coin, stating, “Only by looking beyond or away can one come to believe that such evil is relative, and therefore under certain conditions justifiable” (Berger 295). One can only believe the bombings were justified if one does not, as Solnit said, “revolt against the language that hides that brutality” and acknowledge it as terrorism and evil.

Politicians reframed Caesar’s iron-fisted rule as tyranny, Solnit reframed climate change as violence, and Berger reframed the atomic bombings as evil acts of terrorism. People have an unfortunate tendency to forget their values or to disregard events that should be kept firmly in mind. But as is evident, for better or for worse, sometimes just changing a word that relates to a problem can radically shift the way people think about it. Just as the Romans overthrew a tyrant, people can rebel against the human contribution to climate change and Westerners can acknowledge the terrorist act their countries committed in 1945 as well as the continuing suffering of its victims. Contexts define meaning, and so reframing the context used in the associated discourse can change the reality that people see in something. Perhaps if people reframed the conventional dialogue used in various fields of human endeavor and instead searched for new contexts, the new meanings might present more significant realities.

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Works Cited

Berger, John. "Hiroshima." The Sense of Sight. New York: Vintage International, 1993. 287.

Print.

Solnit, Rebecca. “Climate Change is Violence.” The Broadview Anthology of Expository Prose.

Toronto: Broadview Press, 2016. 759. Print.