Cardinal Blase J. Cupich is the archbishop of Chicago.
On a summer day after the Civil War began in 1861, civilians including elites, politicians and socialites packed picnic baskets with sandwiches and cakes and drove their carriages to Centreville, Virginia, to watch, some through opera glasses, what would eventually be known as the First Battle of Bull Run.
They expected a grand pageant that would be over quickly. Instead, they witnessed the visceral, blood-soaked reality of war. As Confederate forces launched a counterattack, Union soldiers and panicked civilians fled back toward Washington. Their romanticized spectacle of a “picnic battle” had turned into a slaughter with nearly 5,000 casualties.
More than a century and a half later, it seems Americans haven’t truly left Centreville — they’ve simply digitized the view.
That, at least, appears to be the position of the White House, which continues to post videos on its official X account that splice scenes from popular video games and action movies together with strike footage in Iran. In one video captioned “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY,” bombing footage is interspersed with clips from movies including “Iron Man,” “Braveheart,” “Transformers” and “Gladiator.” Another video captioned “UNDEFEATED” linked video game footage from “Wii Sports” and “Wii Sports Resort” to bombing videos. All that’s missing is Maximus the gladiator crying out: “Are you not entertained?”
This horrifying portrayal represents a profound cultural shift in how people consume violence. No need to bring picnic baskets to the battlefield. Now the spectacle is on TV and in social media feeds, turning war from a somber last resort into a high-definition commodity that trivializes human suffering and numbs the moral imagination.
Thermal lenses and crosshairs have replaced the opera glasses of yesteryear. The “enemy” is reduced to pixelated heat signatures on a screen to be struck before they disappear. Such visual language strips away the humanity of targets, turning life-and-death decisions into a sequence of successful data inputs. But it dehumanizes the spectator, too; with the psychological buffer it creates, the violence can be consumed without feeling the weight of the carnage or the burden of empathy for those who suffer.
Even more insidious are the prediction markets that allow for wagering on geopolitical conflicts. These new platforms treat the start date of a war or the effect of an invasion as a set of odds to be wagered on, and the displacement of millions as a market fluctuation. As a dollar value is assigned to the probability of a missile strike, players are incentivized to root for a profitable outcome rather than peace, moving them beyond spectatorship to ghoulish participation.
When people treat war as entertainment, they surrender their humanity. When they allow their consciences to be dulled by the allure of easy profit, they step away from what God desires for his children. When they stop seeing others as human beings and reduce them to pieces in a geopolitical game, they lose the moral compass required to prevent future conflicts.
The spectators at Bull Run learned the hard way that war is not a show. Today, as people watch global tragedies unfold on their phones, they must resist sliding into that same apathy that plagued the picnickers at Centreville.
According to the Pentagon, at least 13 U.S. troops have been killed and hundreds injured since the current Middle East conflict began. Estimates of the total number of people killed exceed 2,000. The U.N. Refugee Agency reports that more than 650,000 people have been displaced in Lebanon. This is not a game. The lives lost, the bodies maimed and the families displaced are tragedies and must be seen that way.
Doing so requires people to reclaim their conscience and their humanity. And that begins with recognizing that on the receiving end of those missile and drone strikes are not video game characters or action movie villains but actual human beings — just like themselves.
The post Americans brought a picnic to the Civil War. These videos are worse. appeared first on Washington Post.
