War is not a computer game or a movie.

You don’t have to be mentally ill to be living in a fantasy world.

Mentally transforming the horrendous into the non-disturbing can come at a high emotional cost.

At the moment, our nation is at war. Much of what we may learn about this war will come from video imagery, which creates a problem that didn’t start with the Israeli-American war against Iran.

Beginning with the Vietnam War, it became possible to view actual images of fighting, wounding, and death. Since such sights are universally upsetting, metaphors were created borrowing from similar scenes and situations as depicted in movies and other visual media.

A whole vocabulary of mediaspeak terms applied to real life has gradually emerged. Included here, among others, are: collateral damage, neutralized, canceled, surgical strike, playbook, rules of the game, high-value target, and gamechanger.

All of these terms and many others are employed in the interest of moral distancing.

When this interchangeability between the vocabulary of media and real life progresses unchecked, events that ordinarily would lead to distress (widespread genocidal attacks on people competing for and with equal rights to the same land or resources, for example) routinely undergo an emotional flattening (the people depicted are “targets” who must be “neutralized”). Or an emotional reframing via terms such as “canceling” or “eliminating,” which arouse little or no emotion. When the word “neutralize” is applied, it is a buffer to reduce the normal distress associated with watching and reacting to carnage and destruction.

This shift from reality to the fantasy world of mediaspeak is made easier because we have become accustomed to employing........

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