Lana Whited at Roanoke.Com

In January, I weighed in on the Elián González. controversy with some questions about children's privacy rights and the media. I questioned whether news organizations were doing enough to keep Elián's face out of sight.

When I saw images of the boy being taken from his Miami relatives and conveyed to his father's custody last Saturday morning, I realized that sometimes we DO have to see children's faces in our newspapers and on our televisions.

I am as disturbed as many people by some of the images from Miami. Certainly the most disturbing is that of a crying Elián hiding in a closet with Donato Dalrymple, the fisherman who rescued the boy last Thanksgiving. Even without the armed Immigration and Naturalization Service agent present, the fact that Elián was hidden in a closet speaks volumes about what the last few weeks must have been like for him.

I heard a CNN analyst noting that the INS's goon didn't have his automatic weapon pointed at Elián and Dalrymple and didn't have his finger inside the trigger assembly. In other words, the confrontation was by the book. The idea of a 6-year-old and an automatic weapon in such close proximity still gives me the heebie-jeebies -- and considerable insight into how Elián himself must have felt. After all, he wasn't looking at the inch between the trigger and the helmeted man's trigger finger.

Personally, though, I found the most profound image to be that of INS agent Betty Mills carrying Elián from the home of his Miami relatives to the waiting automobile. A May 1 Newsweek photo shows the boy clutching at Mills' coat. I found this picture incredibly moving because it captures the trusting nature of children. I don't know whether Elián had ever seen Mills prior to their now-famous moment. But he held on to her at least as tightly as he must have clutched the inner tube which saved him from his mother's fate. The real miracle is that even though we regularly screw up children's lives, they continue to expect us NOT to.

(Along those lines, I thought it was very responsible of The Roanoke Times to include, in its Easter Sunday coverage of the incident, an article counseling parents on how to discuss the disturbing images with their children.)

Over the course of the Elián disaster, I've seen a number of images I wish I hadn't. Among them are all the photos of Elián's infant half-brother, which no editor could make a plausible argument for running. Also among them are most of the pictures of the 6-year-old boy-without- a-country (or with two countries) himself. But three photos from last Saturday were not only acceptable but necessary: Elián in the closet with Dalrymple, en route to the automobile with Mills, and reunited with his father at Andrews Air Force Base.

In her poem "Diving into the Wreck," Adrienne Rich described a diver's descent to explore a shipwreck. Armed with a camera, a knife, a lamp, and a "Book of Myths," the diver ventures down to see with her own eyes "the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth." It is "the thing itself" that the images from Little Havana and the air force base allow us to see.

All the news accounts I've seen or heard stress the confusion within Lázaro González's home during the brief raid. Emotions were running very high. Witnesses gave conflicting accounts of the event. In such a situation, it's very difficult to distinguish truth from perception of truth -- even for the people who are witnessing the event. (Note that the diver, in Rich's poem, takes along the camera, as if she won't even trust her own memory later.) We will probably never know for certain what anyone inside the González house said that morning, but we do have those images which we can judge with our own eyes.

Herein lies one of the concepts which have bolstered the arguments of those who believe Elián should remain in the United States. Because we have free press, we could watch our government discharging its duties -- in this case, enforcing a judge's order. I understand that Fidel Castro permitted the tape of Elián being removed from his uncle's home to be shown on Cuban television. But would he have done so if the federales were his own? Or would he have denied news coverage of the event, fearing the people's reactions? Whatever our own "spin" on the events of last Saturday, we must be grateful for a government which, for the most part, allows us to watch it work.

On Wednesday of the same week, authorities in Columbine, Colorado, began selling videotapes shot inside Columbine High School after the shooting there last April. One news station I watched added, in a voiceover, the disclaimer that what viewers were seeing was mild in comparison to other images on the tape. These images serve a very different purpose than those out of Miami, and no wonder the Columbine victims' parents have protested the tapes' availability to the general public.

There are only two reasons I can think of for being interested in the Columbine tape: one is commerce, and the other is voyeurism. That the authorities selling the tapes want to make money is clear from the asking price of $25, considering that a tape can be duplicated much more cheaply than that. And the distributors can't argue that they have to pay royalties to the musicians whose songs the tape features, as, by all accounts, they didn't bother to ask permission in the first place.

That those who would buy the tapes are motivated by curiosity is equally clear. There is, in the case of the Columbine tapes, no compelling rationale such as our need to see government agents in action. The Columbine video, as I understand it, shows people such as rescue personnel assisting the wounded -- anguished moments the public has no right to witness. It also shows the physical aftermath of violence in the form of books scattered on the floor, blood pooled on the carpeting, chairs out of position, etc. A viewer would be invited to explore how those objects were displaced or stained, reconstructing the violence in his or her imagination. Here we have clearly re-entered the realm of privacy -- the privacy of the Columbine victims and the surviving families.

No such claim could be made for the marshals who seized Elián González. Government officers should expect to discharge their responsibilities in the public eye.

We have, in our media images this week, two "wrecks" on the highway of life in these United States: a 6-year-old boy whose life, we can only hope, was only derailed temporarily, and the "wreck" of what ought to be a safe environment, a high school campus. Rich's poem stresses the importance of seeing those wrecks for ourselves. Of course, we can't be everywhere all at once, and the media often serve as our eyes.

But Rich's poem also teaches us that no wreck is completely negative. Some images, such as those of the Columbine victims, are not ours to see, and we use our diver's knife to cut them away. Others, such as those of the federal officers and Elián González., need to be preserved and studied. With our cameras, we record these images to avoid similar wrecks in the future. If the young men who caused the Columbine "wreck" had had an agent of deliverance, could have clutched onto a truth rather than a myth, perhaps that wreck, too, could have been avoided.

Seeing 'the thing itself': keeping our children out of 'wrecks'