Two stories of the past few weeks reminds me of how true it is that people see what they want to see.

Case in point: The infamous photo of the caskets carrying U.S soldiers who were killed in Iraq. Many people (myself included) saw a touchingly sad image showing the respect that those soldiers received (and deserved) on their final journey home. Many saw what hundreds of AP bylines from Fallujah fail to deliver with such an impact: our soldiers are dying over there.

There were others who saw something completely different in that picture. They saw an image that conveniently fed into the anti-war liberal agenda, the exploitation of dead soldiers and an unfair attack on Bush. Many were outraged that the paper would defy government orders to not print those types of pictures.

Another story from Prosser, Washington offers similar disparities in how an image can divide. A 15 year-old kid works on an art assignment to keep a visual diary. In it, he expresses his feelings about the U.S. involvement in Iraq, including drawings of Bush’s head on a stick. The art teacher, alarmed at the drawings, turns the diary in to the principal, who in turn calls the police, who contact Secret Service.

Again, many people see a kid expressing his opinions about a controversial war. Others see an anti-American kid who didn’t get the punishment he deserved.

I find these stories to be very troubling. I guess I don’t understand. If it were my son, husband, sister, or friend who lost their life in Iraq, I would take such comfort in that picture of those caskets. More importantly, I would still believe that it is our government’s obligation to ensure that the American public see those types of images.

As a democracy, we have a right to see the entire, ugly picture when it is our people who are dying on foreign soil. Does anyone not see the irony of the Pentagon trying to control the images of war we see, a war that started to remove a dictator who controlled the media for his purposes?

The government line about giving the Iraqi people “freedom” rings more and more hollow the longer it goes on.

I’m so saddened that a kid drawing an effigy of Bush (images of which are broadcast regularly on television news from the Middle East) is punished by his school district for making his art assignment political. It saddens me even more to learn that the kid, who sports a Mohawk in a small town, doesn’t “fit in.” I wonder if this ever would have gone as far as it did if that were not the case.

It is okay to not like what you see. But it is not okay when politicians and other people with authority to prevent others from presenting those pictures, warts and all. If the first amendment doesn’t define the freedom that our politicians so glibly talk about when discussing democracy, I don’t know what does.