For me, learning details of the Holocaust, such as how many train cars of Jewish people were sent to each concentration camp, made the horror real. It was a realization. Knowing that 6 million Jews were killed is awful. Seeing bodies dumped into mass graves on a video in high school secured appropriate revulsion. But as I read Hannah Arendt’s report on the trial of Eichmann, it was through the selected, day by day atrocities committed by Eichmann that the meaning of the horror grew.

Similarly, the genocide of American Indians, beginning with the diseases which destroyed up to 80% of the native populations, had a place of disgust and revulsion in my mind. And now, in Ned Blackhawk’s The Rediscovery of America, I’m reading details of colonist/settlers pushing west into the Appalachians, into the Ohio River Valley, into what would become western New York. It’s one thing to know of generalized violence, and for me it’s quite another to learn of the raids, the theft (of silver and land), and the violent, bounty-driven murders.

In my home state of Kentucky, for example, bounties were offered by state leaders for Indian body parts. Kentucky settlers robbed Shawnee burial sites. They stole silver, in which the Indians were wealthy. They murdered. They scalped.

Thoreau once said, basically, if you’ve read the news of one decapitation, you never have to read about another one. I agree, and use his reasoning to justify not reading and listening to as much news as I used to. But I’m worried that his reasoning could be an excuse for checking out, for insulating oneself. If too insulated, you could be robbing yourself of the connection to suffering that provides necessary sadness and rage to do something to change the conditions that created the bad news.