War, Torture, and Liberia

This afternoon I had the pleasure of meeting with Mr. Gregory Stemn. Mr. Stemn is a world-renowned photographer, who spent 20 years chronicling images from the Liberian Civil War. The images he has collected are moving, shocking, and saddening. I feel it is very important this book gets published in a way that moves and motivates people to better understand the conflict and learn what they can do to help.

Am I turning soft on you here? No, Africa has long been an area of both interest and confusion for me. I fully admit my knowledge of this conflict is shallow, at best, but I'm eager to learn more. It's hard to stomach some of the images I was exposed to today, but it is the ugly part of war we need to remind ourselves of.

War to the majority of Americans is something that happens far away, and we see its effects packaged neatly and delivered back to us in flag covered caskets or a solider in a wheelchair. Very few of us experience the rawness of being exposed to the front lines. Maybe if we had war's very worst images in our mind's eye, we would be less likely to support war and war-like violence as a means to solve our problems with other countries.