My Letter to Obama

Dear President Obama,

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” -H. P. Lovecraft

I am writing you in the fragile hope that this letter will prompt a reconsideration of the bans on war photography. It is obvious to me how the phrase “freedom of the press” should apply to the law; or more importantly how it shouldn’t. But the clarity that I find with this issue seems not to be found among those who support the censorship of photography. So I will explain as concisely as possible how censoring war photography creates a nation of naive, fearful, and irresponsible citizens. Please think carefully on the implications of those three characteristics, and whether or not that is a nation we should be proud to call home.

War has been a harsh reality since long before any memory of it could be recorded. Until World War I the larger society who stayed at home and enjoyed either the glory of victory, or suffered the humiliation of defeat, rarely ever understood much more than a fraction of the human convention that is war. This lack of understanding caused people to portray war as a glorious means to an end. And then, quite suddenly, candid portrayals of war appeared in the newspapers, and more importantly in the hearts and minds of the people. And Americans realized that it was not these photographs and shell-shocked youths that had been telling lies, but that it had been them, the people and their sensationalist narrative that had created a travestied image of war. They realized that their airbrushed version of reality had enabled them to cheapen life, by trading it for medals and glory. Censorship welcomes ignorance and fear into a democracy. A policy which runs counter to the values of a moral government that is responsive to the will of the people. A democracy must empower its voters by allowing information to flow uninhibited throughout the nation, or else risk a democracy that has no informed voters, therefore a very malleable public. The uninhibited movement of information allows us to move foreword by granting us the knowledge needed to fearlessly and effectively confront any issue, ensuring a future of our choosing. I won’t take you down an overdramatic slippery slope in the hopes of scaring you into repealing the bans on photography, because I don’t believe that there is a very high chance that the world will descend into chaos if you do nothing. Instead, people will continue being gung-ho about war. They will carry on in their misconceptions that “bombing the hell out of them” is a viable foreign policy and will vote for those who reflect that. War will continue to be seen as something that is inevitable, rather than as it truly is; people, in positions of power, at specific moments, failed to do their job with the precision, honesty, and devotion that the American People expect. If you repeal the bans on photography there will be no riots or court cases. There will only be people who take issue with the state of the world and who will seek to change it. An attitude I know you endorse and encourage. People will be proud because they know that they live in a free country where their government doesn’t hide the truth from them. And they will be able to point at the pictures in the newspapers that are delivered to their homes and say with certainty and pride “my newspaper, in my country, shows me the truth.” These are not people from an impossibly naïve, utopian, fluffy-cloud world. These are the people from the America of tomorrow. These are the people who take hope not from fairy tales or the empty words of an impassioned speaker, but from the world around them, because they know of the horrors and of the wonders, and realize how incredibly far humanity has come. Contrary to the beliefs of those who lack faith in the courage and ability of mankind, the people who see and understand these images will not cower in fear from the horrors they have witnessed in a newspaper, but rather be emboldened by their new understanding. They will not turn their backs to the people just like them who endure terrible suffering. They will be strong enough to look at the truth laid bare before them, and find the power to change the world. Those who have seen the world and the people who inhabit it do not thank censorship for hiding it from them in a misconceived attempt to provide them bliss through ignorance, but curse it for damning others to lives of ignorance and fear of what they are forbidden from understanding. So please, from the bottom of my heart and from the rational depths of my mind, I implore you to repeal all restrictions on journalistic photography and allow America to take a step towards making a better future a reality, by allowing America an unflinching view of the present.

“There is not a truth existing which I fear... or would wish unknown to the whole world.”

–Thomas Jefferson

Sincerely,

Robert Joseph Baguinho Moore