Coordinated violence and the frame of “war”
Imagine that it is broad daylight and you are attending a large public festival. Now imagine that you suddenly realize that you are walking around in your underwear. Perhaps you are one of the many people who would find it disconcerting to suddenly find that so much of your skin, and most every crevice, curve and imperfection of your body was exposed to public view.
This thought occurred to me while I was at a municipal swimming pool with my children. I was surrounded by hundreds of people who were wearing swimming suits that covered no mo
re skin (and often less) than the underwear that many of these people likely wore. Yet these people strutted about and proudly spread out on their towels and lawn chairs without any apparent concern that they were flagrantly exposing so much of their “private” areas to total strangers.
What is it, then, that convinces people to expose so much of their bodies to strangers in one case but not in the other? It would seem that the context of being at a public swimming area constitutes a “frame.”
George Lakoff wrote of the great power of frames in his book, Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Framed the Debate (2004). Here is how Lakoff describes frames:
…Frames are mental structures that shape the way we see the world. As a result, they shape the goals we seek, the plans we make, the way we act, and what counts as a
