Trees Crash, People Clash, But What (and Who) Do We Perceive?

By Eisa Nefertari Ulen, published in The Defenders Online, July 7th, 2009

Trees crash in forests all the time, no one is there to hear, but they still make sounds. Protests happen all over the world, no one records the clashes with police on cell phones, but they still make sounds. They make cries. Yelps. They roar.

In recent weeks, protests have been making noise in more than one international city. We here in the United States just don’t hear our sisters and brothers scream. We don’t hear because we’re not listening. The problem with the reliance on social media in mainstream television reports covering Iran isn’t just that it suggests an erosion of journalistic excellence. It’s the deafening silence from American newsrooms over other equally important world events.

For weeks, students at the National University of Haiti have been on strike and protesting in the streets of Port-au-Prince to demand the reinstitution of essential canceled classes and for an increase in the minimum wage. According to reports, the Haitian National Police and a UN peacekeeping force have launched tear gas into the crowds of rallying young people, and dozens of students have been wounded by police bullets. At least two people have died. Unless you visited Taiwan News or Australia.to News, however, you probably missed it.

Here in America, our reliance on CNN, FOX, and MSNBC is problematic in part because of their sudden infatuation with Twitter. For the brave Haitian students whose work stoppage began in the university’s medical school on April 27, more than a month before the June 12 Iranian election, the consequence of that reliance and infatuation is death. A death of support for their activism, a death of global momentum, a death of voiced expression in the world community. Marginalized yet again, Haitians die in a kind of prison—the prison of imposed silencing.

The revolution, Gil-Scott Heron told us, will not be televised. Today, I’d like to add that the real revolution will not be twittered, either.

When the beautiful Iranian sister, Neda, was killed, she became a symbol of the tragic loss resulting from the state crackdown on protestors. The grainy cell phone video of Neda’s last breaths, her father’s poignant cry for her to open her eyes, the wailing yelps at her loss, the roar of the crowd in the background: all of this roused the world to even greater support for the other Nedas, the other fathers, the Iranians yearning for voiced expression in a true participatory democracy.

The veil lifted on Neda’s classic, all-American blue jeans revealed the humanity of the Iranian—a people McCain joked that he wanted to just “bomb, bomb, bomb” during the 2008 presidential campaign. She, looking so quintessentially human in her vulnerability, blood-stained, first alive, then dead, now symbolizes the Iranian people. Real people, who would die, more and more and more like Neda, if we bombed Iran.

What of the Nedas in Haiti? How many people, real people, are we losing right now because we ignore, forget, deny their protests, their humanity? Does the fate of the rallying cries of disenfranchised people depend on their access to new technology? Is the blood lost in Port-au-Prince less heartbreaking, less tragic, because our Haitian sisters and brothers don’t have cell phones?

If only our news media would do the work of reporting on the world, everywhere, with the energy they have been giving to Iran, then we would know that trees crash in Haiti, too. And bodies fall, and even if no one hears, the sounds they make, even if they aren’t on YouTube or our living room TV, are still from real people, from real people like you and me.