Greed

Whether it’s happening in Bosnia, Afghanistan, or anywhere else for that matter, wars undoubtedly cause a lot of disruption. They disrupt the peace, destroy buildings and hurt families, just to name a few. Joe Sacco, the journalist, author and cartoonist of “Safe Area Gorazde,” tries to accurately reflect the heartache brought forth from the war. In many instances, he does a great job. It is easy to see the suffering that goes on in this war-torn place. Sacco does an excellent job a showing the transformation that happens to the victims. For example, he explains that neighbors who used to be friends are now enemies. While the neighbors of opposite descent are facing similar problems, notably the lack of security, the fear of what to come, and the loss of a stable home, they act as though they cannot understand their old neighbors. They have become strangers to each other. Yet, ironically, they share more in common with each other than they would like to admit. Unfortunately, Joe Sacco is not wrong in his illustration of some of the suffering.

Yet, among the description of the pains of these war victims, Joe Sacco points out something very interesting. It is something that a stranger to war life would not predict or even believe. It is greed. When Sacco recounts his stories of the people in Gorazde, he includes the part about the desires of the victims. They want jeans, cigarettes, and almost everything under the sun. Money is no object, because there is nothing to buy in Gorazde and relatives often send money. Pain, suffering and loss of identity are all aspects of Joe Sacco’s description of Gorazde that are easy to believe, but greed? That was a little harder to grasp.

At first glance, greed just does not make any sense. Why would these people who are faced with constant violence and fear want useless goods like jeans? Shouldn’t they be begging for peace rather than goods? What about a safe exit; isn’t that more intriguing? Don’t they understand that stocking up on material objects will not matter once there are dead? They cannot really be suffering if they are infatuated by greed instead of safety.

Stepping back, the desire for goods no longer sounds that preposterous. If victims are trapped in a ruined city with little to do besides hope for a safe ending, it is not unreasonable that their minds might leap to safer places. They might fantasize about a world without bombings, a world without war. Presumably, if the area that they were imagining were not plagued by constant warfare, it might have a dearth of goods that is no longer available in Gorazde. It might have jeans and food. Maybe, then, thinking about goods is just a way to keep hoping for a future. Maybe it is a way to momentarily step away from the violence that is tarring the city apart.

In fact, at this point, I don’t know if Joe Sacco’s claim that these victims are filled a desire for material goods is unique to Gorazde, or is something that steps beyond this little area. However, it appears to affect other cities in Bosnia. In the movie “Welcome to Sarajevo,” there appears to be a similar desire for goods. When the lead journalist, Michael Henderson, returns to Sarajevo, the driver, Risto Bavic, admits that he has an insatiable desire for dental floss. Later, he explains that recently he has been having many yearnings for goods. So, it is possible to assume that this greed is an element of the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995. Maybe it is even common in other war-torn areas.

After overcoming the initial shock of the ever present greed, accepting that maybe greed simply is not that bad of a coping mechanism, and realizing that it was present in other areas beside Gorazde, I have come to wonder if greed symbolizes something even more powerful. Maybe it reflects our desire to ignore reality. Regardless of whether we are in a developing or a developed world, we have this insatiable desire to acquire meaningless material objects. We want the latest iPod, the newest computer or whatever else the present fad may be. Yet, in doing so, we often ignore the world around us. We create a consumer society to create a fascade of whatever ills that may be affecting us. War is just an extension of our greed or, maybe, it just sounds so unreal or too real in this case.