From the New York Times:

“Netflix said on Thursday that it would not edit its movie “Bird Box” to remove footage of a disaster that killed 47 people in a Canadian town, rebuffing calls from town leaders who called the use of the video insensitive.”

Good.

This has got to stop somewhere, and “Bird Box,” the sensationally popular sci-fi horror film about Sandra Bullock and her children wandering around a forest blidfolded so they won’t see whatever it is that is driving everyone crazy and making them kill themselves, is a good a place to make a stand as anywhere.

In the movie, some things, or demons, or vibes cause insanity if they are seen: people really aren’t safe if they see them. Images that raise unpleasent thoughst and memories in real life are different, but somehow the idea was pawned that people have the right to expect to be “safe” from thoughts, memories, sights, symbols and ideas that might bother them. Thus “woke” college instructors felt compelled to give students “trigger warnings.” This principle, a really bad one that mistakes censorship for sensitivity, quickly metastasized into historical and artistic airbrushing. The National Park Service banned Confederate flags and their images from battlefield  gift shops—might remind some people of the Dylan Roof church shooting. Or slavery. Or racism.  Then the statues started coming down, because, as Carol Folt, blessedly outgoing chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill explained about why the terrifying pedestal of now toppled “Silent Sam,” a campus statue of a fictional Confederate soldier, must be destroyed:

“The presence of the remaining parts of the monument on campus poses a continuing threat both to the personal safety and well-being of our community and to our ability to provide a stable, productive educational environment. No one learns at their best when they feel unsafe.”

Unsafe!

Kevin Spacey’s entire performance in a film was excised because the very image of the actor acting, not even doing the dastardly acts he has been alleged to have done, was deemed to traumatizing for some audience members. High school students have been ordered to remove T-shirts with photos of the President, and hats with the dreaded MAGA letters.

Where will this end? Well, if the super-sensitive, eagerly triggered want to wear their own blindfolds, that’s fine with me., but don’t tell me what I can watch, hear and say.

The producers of the film purchased footage for scene on a TV news report as the world falls apart because of mass suicide and madness. A stock agency called Pond5, which has a library of over 14 million video clips including from military conflicts, natural disasters and fictional scenes, provided film of a 2013 accident in which a train carrying shale oil from North Dakota jumped its tracks in the middle of the night and exploded in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, killing dozens of residents. A tiny percentage of the 80 million households that  have watched Bird Box since the movie’s release just before Christmas recognized that scene, which is just a few second long. Never mind: the town feels it should have the right to have the scene removed.  “You can’t imagine what those images represent for many people here in Lac-Mégantic,” said Marie-Claude Arguin, the town’s executive director. “It’s a reality that many worked really hard to try to forget.”

I sympathize. There are lots of scenes and images that turn up in movies and TV shows all the time that remind me of things I would like to forget. I lost a friend 0n 9-11, but those towers just showed up on an old “Law and Order” episode in the New York skyline. Bucky Dent’s cheap home run in the 1978 play-off game with the Yankees and the ball rolling under Bill Buckner’s legs in the 1986 World Series pop up in commercials and sports specials all the time, and both make me physically ill after 40 and 32 years respectively. Don’t you dare tell me that these traumas can’t compare to a fatal train accident; my traumas are my traumas. How long before Japanese-Americans and anti-nukes start demanding that the atom bomb explosions that end “Dr. Strangelove” be taken out in the interests of sensitivity and “safety”? Not long at all is my guess.

Unfortunately, the slippery slope exists, and this phenomenon proves it. Sure, if there were other footage that would accomplish the same goal as that train wreck, there would nothing wrong with the “Bird Box” producers using that instead in consideration of the victims and family in the small Canadian town. There is a lot wrong with establishing the oppressive ethical principle, however, that anyone’s bad associations with an image or event gives them moral authority to demand its removal reference and memory for everyone else.