Bodies Human, But Are We

Poster from Wikipedia  file 18 Sept 2008

This exhibit has come and gone long ago but continues to be seen in the country from time to time and  represented the degeneracy of people as they went to spend their money $20 for an adult and $15 for a child on looking at executed political prisoners from China  that were  turned into art. In the first year that the exhibit occurred in Feb 20/20 aired the fact that the people involved were executed political prisoners.  People wanting freedom we take for granted. It is highly likely that the women were impregnated in captivity (raped by prison guards) and checked by doctors for the gestation period of the fetus and then executed at different stages The tragedy is the fact that the corps was turned into a non person, a thing to display, and those seeing it were neglecting the fact that this was a real person who had given his life hoping for freedom and was cheated out of not only life but dignity and even used in his death as a thing useful for the country that had robed him or her of his life liberty and the pursuit of happiness  How many Americans went home the night after seeing the exhibit without even thinking and went right off to sleep. They got up the next morning and went to work and stood around the water cooler and talked of the novelty, and interesting aspects of the display. Maybe they had not stopped to think that they had just walked through a concentration camp execution as real as any that had ever occurred in Russia. Why are Americans becoming so callous? A generation or two ago we as a people were shocked at the cruelty in Buchenwald and Auschwitz German concentration camps. 

   But what was the useful aspects of showing this display in China. It would simply drive home the point that the State can do anything they want with you even in death. What was the useful aspect of showing this display in America.? A new generation has risen who has not faced war or the threat of the loss of their freedom and perhaps, just perhaps we are ready for our own death camps and will set on our hind sides as friends and family are haled away. Maybe I just think too deeply;some of my friends went to the exhibit but I had no desire to, as in my minds eye I could visualize that these perfectly preserved specimens who were obviously healthy individuals were not the casualties of natural causes of death. (But China has now made attempts to deny it with little or no proof of the origins of the bodies)

  Today a meat market is involved in China as people with money can go and buy a hart kidney or liver and have it transplanted. One man coming home was obviously shaken by what he had just done and went on TV and was talking about having just spent his money to save his life knowing that it had just cost some poor China-man his life. Perhaps we will only awaken when political controls involves us or someone we love. Perhaps we need to be awakened to the morality and reality of the past and present or we will awaken to have the past repeated in our future or that of our children or have no future worth offering to the next generation at all.  Richard W Norman