The presence of cameras all but eliminated the American public's tolerance for military casualties, for example -- we've completely built our foreign policy around it. America lost 100,000 troops in WWI, 400,000 in WWII, and almost 60,000 in Vietnam. That last one was the turning point -- a flood of full-color footage of maimed soldiers and screaming civilians turned public opinion against the war overnight. The reality of war didn't change, but you can bet your ass that seeing it made all of the difference. We haven't had a comparable war since; Afghanistan saw a tiny fraction of those losses (2,400) and so did Iraq (4,500). Suddenly, soldiers' lives mattered -- the myth of the consequence-free war went the way of the UFO.

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"Why in the hell did you think a horde of screaming Actual Nazis would have their hearts melted by the sight of dying protesters?" you ask. "If anything, they probably get off on it. After all, Americans don't seem to care about hundreds of thousands of bombed Iraqis."

But I'm not talking about the raging Nazis here -- it's only the extreme fringe who'll walk around in public doing that shit, and some of them try to sheepishly talk their way out of it later. The systemic racism that exists in the world doesn't emanate from them, it flows from the comfortable indifference of the majority. The most incurable form of bigotry persists specifically because it doesn't feel like heat coursing through the veins -- it feels like nothing at all. I was born in Trump Country and I only met a couple of people who openly called for black genocide, but knew dozens if not hundreds who simply thought society didn't need changing (and I agreed, at the time). We didn't want the stick figures to die, we just didn't think they needed help. What does a stick figure need food stamps for?

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The latter are the ones I thought would be turned in this age of pervasive cameras and personal connections. It's easy for the comfortable casual racist (who, by the way, hates Nazis) to ignore a headline or pie charts about income inequality. It's harder to ignore a man bleeding in the driver's seat of his car while his young daughter and her mother sit helplessly next to him, wailing in anguish. I didn't think it would change overnight, but over the decades I thought these attitudes would be chiseled away one gut-wrenching video at a time. "Do you see? He's not a fucking statistic. He bleeds. His family loved him just as much as your family loves you. Look."