Month: April 2016

This article, ‘Buddy Check on 22!’ Veterans Use Social Media to Fight Suicide, shone a positive light to social media and while the statistics and things these people who sacrificed their lives for the country go through on and off the line of duty are alarming and horrifying, it is so nice to know that they have a support system if they need one. This entire article was compelling, sad and positive all at once but the lines that called me from the page were, “It was March 22. To many civilians, just another Tuesday. But to thousands of veterans and active-duty soldiers, the 22nd of every month is a reminder to make a suicide prevention spot-check on former comrades.” To think of thousands of men and women feeling a certain way on a certain day every single month, having flashbacks to war zones, was hard to believe but the lines had tones of compassion and camaraderie and it was so positive and uplifting to think of these thousands of men and women being able to have an accessible safety net of people to turn to. Unfortunately, those who have support systems are still afflicted to the point where a support system doesn’t help or matter. My life had never been touched by suicide until last spring when a girl that I had gone to school with took her life a month before her expected high school graduation. Once word got out and the school brought in grief counselors, I remember everyone going back through her Facebook, Instagram and Twitter trying to find a clue or something foreboding that we all had missed. Word got out that she had sent text messages to four or five of her closest friends minutes before she decided to take her own life but those people thought she was being her usual sweet, thoughtful self and had no idea that those would be her final words. She had been active on social media but there were no signs that anyone felt pointed to what she was going to do. I began to wonder if there really had been no one for her to talk to who could have helped her make a different decision. I looked at my own life and thought of the people I would go to if I were having similar thoughts. However, Natalie, like many other people, was afflicted with depression and while I could think of a list of people a mile long to help me out, her brain blocked her from thinking of a single person. I can only imagine my brain blocking me and then being filled with war images of death, violence and dust like the veterans that suffer with PTSD. We will never really know the thoughts that go through a specific person’s head before they decide that life is no longer worth living, but it is comforting to know that those that come home alive from the war, have a growing system of support. It would be nice to know that every person had this same net of support through an accessible social media platform. Are schools, private agencies and the government doing enough to raise awareness about suicide across the country?

This Op-Doc from the New York Times called, Games You Can’t Win by David Osit and Malika Zouhali-Worrall was by far the darkest thing that I have had to write about in this class. While many aspects of the article and video were very poignant, what called me from the page was, “While their reasons for creating these games vary, one element clearly unites these developers: the video game is their chosen artistic medium, and programming is their paintbrush.” Upon first reading this the comparing of these dark video games to art really surprised me and I felt as though it was an unjust comparison. How were these dark and upsetting video games anything compared to a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat that hangs in the most famous museums in the world or even a piano piece written by a child? When the authors of the article portion of the Doc-Ed opened up with the line, “Video games are generally associated with guns and explosions — a medium better suited to escapism than intimacy” I got the impression that the authors felt videogames were just a game that teenage boys played and one that they did not deem held any other merits other then to express pent up aggression. As a senior in high school, brother spends more time playing on his XBOX then he does with my parents, a fact that I am sure many sisters of teenage brothers would corroborate. It was weird for me to think that his controlling an animated football player to run up and down an animated football field or defending an animated country in animated war was art. Once I watched the video and saw the plight and trauma that the three experiences caused on the four people highlighted in the documentary, I understood why someone, like the animated football maker or animated war maker, would want their story told in a way that instead of reading it as a book or hearing it as a song or viewing it hanging on the wall, could be felt and seen step by step in a video game. As hard as it would be to watch and to play a “game” that can not be won and demonstrates a sex change or living with a child with terminal cancer, it is a way to convey every emotion and the feeling of a never ending struggle just like Basquiat conveyed on canvas or the way the Coronation of Napoleon tells a story hinging in the Louvre. Why is it that people, like I was, are turned off by the idea of immersing themselves in a game about a child dying from terminal cancer but could stare at a paining of mass annihilation or a traumatic event in history for hours in awe?

Osit, David, and Malika Zouhali-worrall. “Games You Can’t Win.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 16 Mar. 2016. Web. 18 Apr. 2016.