Associated Press photographer, Eddie Adams, won a Pulitzer Prize for a photo that led millions of Americans to assume that a sadistic tyrant killed an innocent man. This photo turned the tide on the support for the Vietnam War.
More importantly, it also led to one noble man's life being ruined by false impressions that were created by a slice of time.
A photo is essentially a slice in time, and that can capture a beautiful moment or a terrible moment. It does not say anything about the past or anything about the future. I am sure Adolf Hitler had very sweet baby photos, just as all babies do. On the other hand, I am sure you can find a photo of Mother Theresa frowning - would we then think less of her?
In our relationships, we take a lot of photos both with our digital cameras and with our mind's camera. Sometimes the photo does not really show the truth that lies beneath, just like what Eddie Adams had to say about his own photo:
"I won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for a photograph of one man shooting another ... The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths.
General Loan was what you would call a real warrior, admired by his troops. I'm not saying what he did was right, but you have to put yourself in his position.
...This picture really messed up his life. He never blamed me. He told me if I hadn't taken the picture, someone else would have, but I've felt bad for him and his family for a long time. I had kept in contact with him; the last time we spoke was about six months ago, when he was very ill.
I sent flowers when I heard that he had died and wrote, "I'm sorry. There are tears in my eyes." "
The truth was that Lem (the man being shot) had killed one of General Loan's (the man with the gun) officers and wiped out his entire family. General Loan was the chief of the national police, a close friend of the Prime Minister of South Vietnam then. As Adams followed General Loan around days after the execution of Lem, he found that he was a local hero and very well-loved by the Vietnamese. He was doing all he could to keep Viet Cong guerrillas from Saigon.
Similar to photos, we now have thousands of websites offering trivia profiling quizzes to rank and rate your own relationships. A friend came up to me and said what I though of the perennial favourite - "If your mother and your girlfriend both fell into the sea, who would you save first?"
That was a pretty clear answer to me - depends on who can swim better.
Apparently, that answer was not what my friend had in mind. I was supposed to say either my mother of my girlfriend, and that was supposed to categorise me into a particular group of people.
A hypothetical scenario is the same like a photo. It stands alone, unreal, with no appreciation of the past nor any regard for the future. A google search will pull up thousands of relationship based profiling quizzes all over the internet.
I heard that a new create quiz is making its way around the internet and is a tad more intellectual. If you had to choose between killing one person and five persons, who would you choose? It even has a part duex to the quiz, to compel you to clarify your own line of reasoning!
How do I choose without knowing whether the five persons may be convicted murderers on death row and the one person is a highly skilled surgeon who has saved many lives and will continue to do so in the future?
Relationship profiling quizzes and photographs are all instantaneous snapshots of the moment in a relationship. I was just watching an episode of The Simpsons and Homer thought that Marge was having an affair because he saw a snapshot of her meeting up covertly with the local beer salesman. He got depressed and committed suicide. At that precise moment, a mysterious force gave him the ability to see beyond the snapshot and he saw that Marge was actually planning a surprise party for him!
Have you been doing silly things in your relationship because you thought that your partner purposely wanted to hurt you? Maybe your wife snaps at you after work, or it seems like she talks more to her colleagues than you. Is your husband only caring about himself when he is watching tv or is he planning for the family?
It is always so tempting to judge with a mental snapshot. Think of events that made you angry, I would bet right now that most of the memories are snapshots of the moment. At the very most, they are short video clips.
Post Source: EzineArticles
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