Split Screen: Listening as an act of resistance

The noise of war should not be normal in any U.S. city.

For The Contrarian, I usually write about visuals—how images shape our understanding of power and politics. Today, I want to write about sound. Specifically, the sound that has become the unwelcome soundtrack to daily life in Washington, D.C.: helicopters.

I live in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood, and every day, at what feels like all hours, there are helicopters overhead. We hear them before we see them; sometimes, we don't see them at all. The wind rushes through the trees as my dog looks up, alert and confused.

Sometimes, it's early morning while I'm making coffee, and I glimpse a helicopter cutting across our kitchen window. Sometimes, it's early evening and, as I’m carrying bags of groceries, this now-familiar silhouette emerges over the rooftops. Sometimes it's late at night, and as our neighbors try to put their children to sleep, the mechanical thrum keeps us all awake. As someone who used to work for the Vice President of the United States, I’m aware of Marine One and Marine Two, which are used to fly the President and VP to and from Joint Base Andrews, and other more routine helicopters. But since the announcement on Aug. 11 of the militarization of our nation’s capital, there are more helicopters overhead– and it’s a familiar playbook from President Donald Trump. Back in 2020, he deployed helicopters to intimidate racial justice activists.

Let us not become inured to the sound of these helicopters. It is not normal in the civilian capital of a democratic country to constantly hear military aircraft overhead.

It is not normal to hear helicopters as you jog to the gym, as you walk your child to soccer practice, as you fold laundry, as you take out the trash. It is not normal for this sound to interrupt the birds eagerly checking the feeder outside your window, to compete with the simmering marina for the spaghetti dinner, to form the background soundtrack as you chat with your mother on the phone.

Yet normalization is exactly what's happening. One recent morning, as I made coffee and heard the sound again, it occurred to me: This is how they normalize occupation. This is how civilian populations become desensitized to increased unnecessary and dangerous militarization. The flood of news and government overreach has been compressed into small blue squares on our phones, creating digital distance from our physical reality. But I will not let the sound of helicopters become ambient noise.

Sound has always been a tool of control and normalization. Unlike images, which we can choose to look away from, sound penetrates our defenses. It enters our homes, our private moments, our moments of peace.

This normalization has happened throughout history. In Nazi Germany, as Jewish families disappeared, neighbors gradually became desensitized to the sounds of doors breaking, people screaming as they were dragged from their homes, trucks arriving in the night.

During the Troubles in Northern Ireland, children walking to school grew up normalizing the sound of explosions. Entire generations developed psychological frameworks for continuing daily life while bombs detonated in the distance.

Today in Afghanistan, as laws prohibit women from traveling far from their homes without a male relative, banned from teaching and learning at secondary schools, publicly flogged for improperly wearing a hijab, an entire population is becoming desensitized to the sounds of gender-based violence. Perhaps, most deafening, the silence where women's voices should be.

These examples, though not entirely analogous, reveal a consistent pattern: It is part of the human survival instinct to become desensitized to persistent threatening sounds. We have to adapt to continue functioning. The helicopter sounds over D.C. represent a form of acoustic occupation, a militarization of our civilian soundscape.

Last Friday, I was on a work call with someone living in Chicago but who was born and raised in Washington, D.C. We joked about how we'd switched places—I'm originally from Highland Park, Ill.—when I heard the familiar sound approaching. My surprise at my own surprise caught me off guard. I felt fear and rage bubble up.

"D.C. is so different from what you remember," I lamented, pausing as the chopper passed my home overhead. "That was a helicopter. It's insane."

This isn't about living in a constant state of overwhelm. But we can refuse to normalize the sound of the helicopters. This simple act of noticing is, itself, resistance.

As I write this, I can hear another helicopter approaching from the east. I pause my typing and listen until the sound fades. I will not let this become ambient noise. I will continue to notice, to document, to resist the normalization of what should remain extraordinary.

Azza Cohen (she/her) is an award-winning documentary filmmaker who served as Vice President Kamala Harris's official videographer in the White House. She recently founded a production company with her wife, Kathleen, and is writing a book about visual sexism from a cinematographer's perspective. Uncover and address visual sexism alongside Azza every other week here on The Contrarian and on Instagram and Bluesky. The New Yorker distributed her film “FLOAT!” in 2023.

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