Soldiers Joking in Photo Around Casket Spark Rage

[MADem]

6. I am not going to condemn these kids. I am going to question their judgment with regard to

memorializing their private moments with photographs, though.

They aren't desecrating a corpse, they aren't disrespecting any person. They aren't disrupting or disrespecting a ceremony. They are in a training environment, learning the "how to" of a gruesome, shitty, emotionally laden job.



I couldn't get the link to work (probably me) so I went to BBC and got this link, it's the same story, essentially:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-26252546

They do a job that is fucking DEPRESSING. What this is, is "blowing off steam," aka "gallows humor." This is a team-building "we're all in the same boat" moment for this crew. If you've never had to work funeral details it's rather difficult to understand. If you have, you get what they're doing. Their mistake--and it WAS a mistake--was to memorialize their goofing around on film.

IMO, anyway.

Twenty years ago no one would have seen a photo like this. Thirty or forty years ago, no one would have wasted the film on this sort of picture.

There's a real learning curve happening with regard to social media, and for some, like this group, it is terribly steep and terribly consequential. The individual who posted the picture to frigging Instagram had a MAJOR brain fart. This isn't the kind of thing that should be distributed electronically--it really shouldn't be memorialized or distributed at all. But to suggest that people working funeral details/honor guards don't EVER muck around, in private, during times when they aren't actively supporting the mission is just wishful thinking. It's a way to process/distance oneself from the gloom and sadness surrounding the duty.