A Tragic Difference

Somehow, American outrage at the My Lai massacre seemed slow to gather. It took time, as the images and confessions multiplied, for the horror to sink in, the pain and revulsion to spread. Has the national consciousness been so bludgeoned by public deaths and political astonishments, so amazed by the impossible triumphs of technology, that it has developed some kind of natural defense against surprise? Against powerful emotion?

That is undoubtedly part of it. "The price of eternal vigilance," says Marshall McLuhan, "is indifference." In the same way, the cost of constant excitement, of a persistent and violent rearrangement of one's sense of order, results in surfeit. The mind is overcome by a kind of compassion fatigue. The events of the '60s have profoundly disturbed the American sense of reality. The longest war in the nation's history, with the American combat dead and wounded last week passing 300,000, seems at once horribly strange and grimly familiar. All too accustomed to daily deaths in Viet Nam, Americans needed time to grasp the fact that these particular deaths, caused by these particular young Americans, represented a very tragic difference.

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