It’s late and of course I should be in bed, but instead I’m up watching video’s on TED.com. Tonight it was this talk from Deborah Scranton, a documentary filmmaker, speaking about her documentary The War Tapes. Scranton had the opportunity to embed with a National Guard unit in Iraq. But rather than go herself as an outsider, she equipped the soldiers with cameras and all the other gear they would need to film their experiences themselves. She wanted to capture life there truly from their perspective.

The stories she ends up with in her film are about the horrors of war and what war does to human beings. Not just the physical violence, but the emotional and spiritual stress it puts people through. The face to face confrontation of life in America versus life in a war zone. The realization of what people are capable of doing to each other and the aftermath. Scranton is clearly shaken as she relates the stories told in the film and the experiences she has had talking with veterans upon showing the film around the country.

One of the myriad of questions I will sometimes ask myself late at night is if I really am ready for the future I say I want. If I really, truly want to document what life is like for half the people on the planet who live in war zones or deal with starvation or disease or extreme poverty. Am I ready to interview people whose lives have been torn apart by people fighting in the name of religion or ethnicity or for reasons no one even remembers. I had a preview of that in Uganda when a single mother was telling me how lucky I am to be born in America. She’s right, and I had no answer for her. As much as I want to bring those stories back to the US to open the eyes of people here to the realities of the world, chances are I will never be able to make things better for anyone I meet. There will never be a word I can say or a touch I can give that will cure what ails them. And somehow I will have to come to grips with that. Somehow I will have to figure out how I can come back to the US, to my comfy bed, my xbox and my big screen tv. It’s a dangerous question and I don’t know the answer yet. I don’t know that there is an answer.

Filed under: life by Jonathan