Faces of Death
Human Nature’s Cruelty (and What Witnessing It Means to This Practicing Buddhist)
[Warning: this article contains graphic descriptions of death and human suffering, which may upset sensitive readers. Here, there will be NO links to disturbing video clips and NO distressing imagery. I advise that readers please not seek these out via ‘Google’ searches; they are absolutely NSFW/L.]
The setting, if I remember correctly, is someplace in the Middle East. With a grim feeling in the pit of my chest, I watch the computer screen and soon a young man comes into view. He’s probably no more than eighteen to twenty years old, and his hands are bound behind him as a small parade of his captors leads him to what I now realize is an execution site. For some reason that is never made clear, the young man has been sentenced to death.
The video cuts to his mother — she is weeping in a terrible display of maternal anguish — and then back to the youngster. He has fair skin, dark hair, and could be any teen-aged boy attending one of our local Arizona high schools.
What I’ll never forget for as long as I live is the stark, horrific resignation on his face as he is led to the target spot and positioned with his back against it. It is the look of a petrified human being who knows that he’s about to die. He knows that he’ll likely feel intense pain (even if the killing is swift) before his soul is ripped from his body… and that there is nothing he nor his sobbing mother can do about it.
The young man is then blind-folded. I hold my breath, unsure of what I’m about to see, and ponder switching the video off before a hail of bullets from off-screen is pumped into the boy’s chest.
There is a pause, and I don’t see any blood.
Is…is he dead?
Then the boy moves. He turns his head, and it is obvious that he is both disoriented and in pain.
The execution team, upon realization that he isn’t dead, lets fly with another round of bullets. This time, the entire right side of the boy’s face collapses in upon itself, and he ceases to resemble anything that can be called a person.
I slam the laptop shut and close my eyes, tightly. I feel dirty on the inside, as if I need some sort of internal shower that can flush what I’ve just witnessed out of my mind completely.
I just watched someone die.
[Photo courtesy of Sébastian Prado from Unsplash]
The human being is a curious creature.
Most of the time, we know that we shouldn’t stare overtly, point, and meddle into other peoples’ private affairs. Human sophistication has ensured that we recognize the need of each person to be able to lead a life of dignity. We know that we shouldn’t make spectacles of other people — much less ourselves — and still, we do it.
We stare at car accidents, at state troopers making an arrest on the side of the highway, and at the police officers who’ve responded to a neighbor’s domestic disturbance for the third time in a week. Whether it be behind a curtain, through an upstairs window, or via a crack in the front gate, we stare.
When matters evolve into ‘life-or-death’, the human desire to witness with one’s own eyes the carnage, abuse, or death of another person is no less intoxicating. In the mid-2000s, this phenomena made its way into the bedrooms and the dens of nearly everyone who had an Internet connection when terrorists from the Middle East began beheading foreign contractors in front of camera lenses.
Terrified prisoners suffered the horror of having their heads sawn off with dull knives, a grisly ‘procedure’ which often took many minutes and far too long for the struggling, rasping individual to die.
And all of a sudden, we could see it.
In spite of the anger, indignation, and profound sadness of the countries who had lost fellow countrymen to these terrorists, the people who had cared for them still felt the compelling urge to find a shock-site and click on these forbidden links.
(For the record: I have not witnessed any beheading videos, so there will be no descriptions of such murder here. All murder is cruel, and death is rarely peaceful even when a person dies at home or in hospice. But there is something so inherently horrific and degrading about the violent removal of the human head and its supposed seat of consciousness that I have never felt compelled to witness it, and never will.)
Before long, viewing these abysmal acts of terror became commonplace, as did the ridiculous trend of filming people’s reactions to said terror. What I found to be the most disturbing over the years were the countless middle-schoolers, teens, and young adults who viewed such content and laughed, making sport out of these brutal deaths when surely they themselves were too young to even understand what they were looking at.
What’s funny about it?
What’s compelling about it?
And what’s humorous enough about it to make one want to trick one’s unsuspecting friends into viewing these acts without warning them beforehand?
The more answers I sought to find for this piece, the more seemed to bubble forth from the surface of my psyche, not unlike the foam that scums the crest of ocean waves.
I formulated this piece out of fear… and not just the fear of death. These words were born from having seen atrocities like those described above without my consent, back when I was about thirteen and my step-father thought it would be ‘fun’ to buy one of those ‘Banned from TV’ V/H/S tapes advertised in commercials and let me watch.
These words were born out of the sadness and shock I felt after viewing the ‘Red Asphalt’ videos that were mandatory in my 1999 driver’s education course.
They were born out of my own guilt at having watched other people die at my own choosing, hoping against hope that the images on screen wouldn’t be as horrible as what they were, and wracking my brain in shame when they were so much more.
This article is about death, and the various ways I’ve seen people meet either harm or their inevitable demise.
It is raw. It is real. It is sincere.
Injury and Death Caused by Animals
Science (and the Buddhist scriptures by which I try to live my life) tells us that there are countless living beings in just as many infinite galaxies, and that all of them, whether gnat, whale, demon, or human, wish to be happy and free from suffering.
There are many beautiful things about our precious planet Earth and the creatures we share it with. Unfortunately, because of the prevalence of the three poisons of anger, ignorance and jealousy that the Buddha expounded upon, animals and other sentient beings have much to fear from us — and us from them.
This was evident in one video I watched, in which a distraught, middle-aged woman in a nightgown paced up and down her driveway wailing, “I don’t want to go to jail! I can’t go to jail!” The reason for this expression of grief: her dog — a large pit bull — had escaped the house and latched on to the responding animal control officer’s hand. This dog was absolutely ferocious, growling and snarling and not once letting go; meanwhile, terror and pain etched themselves onto the officer’s forehead as she tried unsuccessfully to free her hand. The camera cuts, and we see the officer being led away to the back of an ambulance, her hand finally freed and wrapped in a large bandage.
But this hardly compared to the fate of an unfortunate man in the same video. What I saw was a man standing upright in a canoe, a cowboy hat perched smartly on his head while he did something with a rope in the water (there was no narration on where or when this took place, but the hairstyles and clothing of other people in the video indicate that this could have been sometime in the mid-seventies). The rope suddenly became taut, and the man was pulled off the canoe and into the lake. After this, the filming became erratic, cutting to a close-up of the man in the cowboy hat. He’d been snatched by an angry alligator. The creature began the insidious ‘death-roll’ with the man in its jaws, churning the water into a froth. It was clear when the camera panned into the lake that the man was now dead. His body was limp, pale, and ghostly white. Some of his clothes had come off, and he looked like a flattened rubber doll. Meanwhile, there was screeching from on-lookers. The horrified faces of the adults yanking their children away from the water said everything there was to know about the ghastly scene. When death occurs, particularly in a manner like this, it is ugly. It is frightening. No-one wants to see it, and yet everyone does.
Death by Accident
The demise of ‘train girl’ (as she is known in some subreddit communities) was inadvertently captured on film by a train enthusiast, who was documenting the train’s initiating journey just outside of Chicago. On the video, the train could be seen advancing as a small group of individuals dressed in business attire hurried to cross the tracks. The engine didn’t appear as if it were going too fast, thus fooling the people on the video into a false sense of security as they began to cross the tracks. The first few people made it. The woman — smartly dressed and with blondish hair arranged in a professional up-do — wasn’t so lucky. As she stepped onto the tracks, there was a split-second in which she seemed to realize that the train was going to strike her and she froze, trying in a futile manner to brace herself for what was to come. The impact of the train striking the poor woman was swift and brutal. Her body was hurled off the track and flew toward the camera like a rag doll, and the woman, said to have been on her way to a court hearing about her divorce, ceased to exist.
But supposing death occurs while a person is having fun or proverbially ‘doing what they love’? Does it really make the experience of death somehow better for the person who was only moments ago engaging in their favorite activity? What about closure for friends and family, particularly if they witnessed the fatal accident? Is it easier for a mother, a sister, a cousin, a niece or nephew to grieve when their loved one was alive one moment and in the next reduced to a corpse?
The next clip featured a group of care-free teenagers enjoying themselves at the beach in what was probably the late seventies or early eighties. A giggling young girl can be seen removing her swim-suit top to go jet-skiing in the unnamed lake. At one point she let go, but when the boat circled back around to retrieve her, the worst happened: she was caught underneath the boat’s propellers. The girl’s horrified friends dove into the water to rescue her and carried the stricken woman back to the beach. Deep red gashes have been grooved onto her chest, and she failed limply as if fighting off the imminent throes of death. It was unclear as to whether the young woman survived these injuries.
The next clip was no less grisly. Again, a group of teenagers congregated and proceeded to use alcohol to celebrate their high-school graduation. A few of them gathered to drink on the roof-top of a tall building, apparently having decided that there was no better way to celebrate than by the ultimate, adrenaline-fueled experience — bungee jumping. The tragic part of this case was that while measuring the rope needed for their thrill, the group made a fatal error and failed to account for one floor. This left the rope too long. Oblivious to what was coming, a young man on the roof swallowed his beer, and his confidence seemed to swell as he was egged on by his excited companions. Pumped with alcohol and bravado, he attached himself to the rope and dove head-first off of the building’s top floor. A video camera on the ground had been set up to capture the risky triumph. What it captured instead was the young man’s gruesome death as he not only fell onto the ground, but also into it as his body is completely flattened by the impact. There were shrieks and confused shouting. An ambulance and police officers made a swift appearance, trying to comfort a sobbing young woman, and the camera briefly pans to what is left of the young man’s body. It is bloody, misshapen, and looks nothing at all like a human being. It is the total destruction of a life in a single moment.
Death by Execution
By far, these kinds of death are much, much worse.
One execution video, supposedly filmed somewhere in Russia or eastern Europe, depicted a group of officials snatching a man away from his house, wife, and child, who were seen weeping as authorities used ropes to tie his hands to one horse and his legs to another. At their riders’ signal, the horses charged off in opposite directions, easily severing the man’s arms and legs. The quality of the recording was poor, a fact probably merciful for the viewer but certainly meaningless for the man who had just been drawn and quartered. A brief close-up of the torso missing its arm and leg was appalling.
And yet, people are capable of still worse atrocities.
The barbaric execution of a young Jordanian pilot by the Islamic State might take the cake as the most vile and execrable. In this video, filmed sometime in 2015, ISIS captors had Muath al-Kassabeh placed outside in a large cage. They have also strewn gasoline in a long line leading to the cage and soaked the poor man’s prison attire with it. A pit in my stomach twinged even before the executioners set the gasoline trail alight. The pilot watched stoically as the flames approached him; he didn’t run, cry, plead, or even try to avoid the flames. But his torture became starkly evident when his body was suddenly engulfed. At this point he gripped his head with both hands, the way a person does when he has a headache, and began pacing in the cage in panic. After a few moments, I became aware of something just below the surface of the Arabic music that accompanies the video: the young pilot is screaming. Eventually he approaches the bars, collapses onto his knees, and leans helplessly against his cage while the fire ravages his body. Flecks of fat can even be seen dripping from his face. This was how Muath al-Kasabeh met his end.
The Islamic State, which was responsible for the death of al-Kasabeh, was capable of still more reprehensible deeds. In another video, a small group of men were seen locked in a medium-sized cage, which was suspended over a body of water. It was immediately evident what ISIS intended to achieve. These men were to be drowned, and their captors had even placed underwater cameras in the lake to capture the horrid death that awaits them. Slowly, the suspended cage was lowered, and again I was struck by the quiet poise of the condemned. No-one seemed to be begging for release, and one man even appeared to be praying. Once the cage was completely submerged, the camera cut to beneath the water, and I could briefly see the prisoners as they suffered their watery doom. One man was gripping the bars and desperately stamped his feet in agony. I could only hope that the pain of drowning did not last long for these prisoners, whose ‘crime’ was unexplained. When the cage was hoisted above the water some minutes later, the men inside were crumpled into untidy heaps. All were dead. One still leaked bloody foam from the injury to his lungs. Having been a respiratory therapist for nearly a decade, I have seen pulmonary edema. When the lungs are filled with fluid, the patient panics and the pain is overwhelming. Quickly attaching the patient to a non-invasive machine (called BIPAP) may or may not help reverse the condition. If it does not, the patient may need to be intubated. Suffering from fluid-filled lungs even in the best of hospitals is excruciating. How much more so was it for the men in ISIS’s dreadful cage?
In yet another diabolical video set up to capture the torture and pain of its prisoners, ISIS criminals locked a pair of men in a small car. I wasn’t quite sure what was going on at first; the captors seemed to be talking amongst themselves, but the two young men were staring vacantly into the void. They seemed to know that terror awaited them, and bore such dejected, resigned facial expressions that I longed to reach through the screen to try to offer comfort that they would never be able to receive. Finally, the terrorists retreated. The camera was set up a good distance away from the car, which the prisoners could not escape from. After some moments, a loud missile was fired. It struck the vehicle and engulfed the two prisoners in a massive ball of smoke and fire. Good, I thought grimly as I peered at the carnage through my fingers. At least this has been a quick death. That thought was shattered when I realized that the missile blast hadn’t killed the men. They were still alive inside of the engulfed car… and they were screaming.
I saw even more tortures of prisoners by this terrorist organization, but I’d rather not remember them right now (let alone write about it anymore). I can’t even provide a good reason as to why I chose to look at these death videos, which now remain permanently seared into my subconsciousness.
I can’t say that I learned anything from these gory videos, except for the fact that people are routinely sadistic and cruel to other members of the human race. Once a person or group of individuals has been deemed as ‘other’ by a government, terrorist organization, or even a lynch mob, it paves the way for indescribable cruelties to be done to the minority group, and for such acts to be viewed as necessary, good, or even humorous. It is as if an unfamiliar religion, ambiguous identity, opposing political affiliation, or perceived traitorous deeds reduce a person to something like a human cockroach, something that can only be dealt with via extermination — even though these persecuted prisoners also have hair, eyes, skin, bones, limbs, and blood… just like their captors. It is as if these ‘human cockroaches’ cease to be brothers, fathers, uncles, nephews, or grandfathers. It is as if these ‘human cockroaches’ give up their status as mothers, daughters, aunts, grandmothers and nieces.
You are too different and have ‘sinned’ — therefore, you must die.
I watched these videos (albeit with a grave countenance) of my own accord. No-one forced me. No-one tricked me. I have little excuse.
I can blame my step-father for sharing grim films and graphic photos in my teen-aged years without me ever telling him it was okay to do that. As a state trooper, he frequently documented the scenes at fatal accidents, and in one instance he brought back photos he had taken of a young man who had died in a motorcycle accident. The rider was dismembered, and now the photos are etched into my memory.
But I can’t blame him completely. I could have listened to my inner revulsion and never looked at such disturbing materials again, but for my driver’s education class, we were shown more graphic accident photos to scare us into safe driving. By that time I was nearly twenty, and had resigned myself to the idea that looking at graphic videos and photographs was — well, ‘normal’.
The urge to look, to witness, was nudged into my psyche during the most formative years of my life. Why? To stay informed? To see what other people were seeing? To be able to say ‘Glad I’m not gonna die that way’? To be able to start a sentence with ‘Did you see that one too?’.
I learned not a damned thing from any of these death videos except a renewed sense of urgency to live my life in the best way I can, because life for all human beings is ultimately short. There will be accidents. There will be murders. There will be executions. Because of greed, ignorance and jealousy, it is in this way that the world will continue.
How to Live for a Peaceful Death
Death ultimately comes for us all, whether we have pushed all thoughts of it to the outermost regions of our psyche or spent a lifetime chasing the ‘thrill’ of watching other people die. Fortunately for humankind, however, the Buddha taught that there are five ways of being that can keep us safe and shield us from having to suffer in terrible ways such as these.
If we do not kill, we prevent ourselves from being arrested, tried, and convicted for murder. Not killing means not shortening our own life force; never having to face the botched executions that result from paralytic drugs and needles; and not creating the karma that will one day cause someone else to want to kill us — whether in this life, the next, or at the moment of death, when those we have harmed often materialize with demands of revenge.
Abstaining from alcohol and drugs will benefit us in a similar vein. If we are alcohol free, we will not get behind the wheel of a car and possibly kill an innocent pedestrian or fellow driver. If we are drug and alcohol free, we will refrain from making careless decisions that will cause pain not just to ourselves, but our relatives and loved ones also. If we are drug and alcohol free, we will not be a slave to addiction or succumb to an overdose and leave our broken bodies for devastated loves ones to find.
In the era of post- #MeToo and the interest of vulnerable people everywhere, we should never use our sexuality irresponsibly. If we can constrain ourselves, especially regarding young people and children, we can avoid invading someone’s personal space or subjecting them to advances, words, and actions that aren’t welcome and could even be considered rape.
If we lie, we destroy other people’s faith in us. Why would we want to sever the bonds of trust that others have built with us? Our relationships with other people, animals, and the environment are largely symbiotic. Why would we want to cause damage to what is, essentially, an interconnected web of being and consciousness?
Stealing today is all too rife, and not just in taking something from a place of business, as most people tend to imagine when they hear the term. Pilfering someone’s jewelry, jacking someone up for cash, and callously planning a home invasion are not the only ways that stealing can hurt people. When people claim a heritage or identity that is not their own (think of Rachel Dolezal or Hillary Baldwin), that is stealing. When people culturally appropriate music, clothing, and hairstyles without crediting the communities that these gifts have come from, that is stealing. People do not take kindly to being stolen from; most people get very angry, desire revenge, and will even hire criminals to ‘rough someone up’ or, in the worst of cases, kill them. (Taking someone else’s life is also a form of stealing.)
If we can live by these simple rules, no matter which religion (or not) we choose to align ourselves with, we can largely prevent causing harm and damage to other people and save our own lives.
We all still have to die, of course. That much is inescapable. But maybe — just maybe — living with virtue can save us from being just another entry in the many Faces of Death.
Sources: www.rand.org, the Washington Post, Alarabiya News, Wikepedia, cbsnews.com, BBC, The Sun, NBC News
