A friend of mine was discussing her criminal justice class with me recently. She mentioned one class in which she had to watch a security video taken from a prison during a riot. There was a point in the video where one inmate stabbed another, and kept on stabbing. My friend is not faint-hearted. She is not afraid of violence. Yet she told me that she spent the rest of the class, and some of the day, in a daze.
I actually had to sit down and think about that to recall how differently things that are 'real' can affect people. Somewhere along the line I must just set aside the fact that movie violence and real violence are so wildly different. So had she, apparently, since she was shocked at her own reaction, thinking herself beyond that sort of thing. Yep. Me too. How about you?
I don't think I know anyone who is completely immune. Plenty who think they are, but no one who could stand there, and watch a stabbing, and not feel something. It's the people who believe they can, who don't feel anything when thinking about violence of that kind, who bother me. I have no doubt those people could deal with knowing that someone is being stabbed, somewhere, by someone else, and not feel very much about it. As long as they don't have to see it.
This is how generals order thousands of troops to risk their lives. It's how people hire assassins, and sentence people to death and so on. And I'm not saying it's a bad thing. It has its uses. What worries me is how easily we forget that murder and violence is as horrible to experience as it is. I don't believe those instincts are there for no reason, and I don't want to imagine what could happen if we as a culture were to forget entirely that murder causes such terrible feelings, or even that it is a bad thing at all, save in theory.
Imagine a world where we have people or machines to do the dirty work--killing, violence, whatever--for us. We don't have to see it, or think about it or feel bad about it. The thought of murder doesn't bother us -- we've become immune to it -- so the implications don't bother us. Easy as can be.
I'm not saying that we're headed in that direction. I hope we're not. But I do think death no longer holds the meaning for us that it once did, and that worries me. Once you lose respect for something (say, murder and its implications), losing any adherence to it is not far behind. It's not movies, video games or any kind of media that's causing this kind of change. It's the mindset of our entire civilization.
I wonder what our children will be like. Or our grandchildren. I wonder if there will come a time where people are raised without respect for other people or consideration for human life. I wonder how long life on this planet will endure after that. I like to think that it was respect for life that kept people from pushing the buttons on the nuclear weapons all these years.
But then, I'm an optimist.
Write to Jonathan at tenement_cellar@msn.com
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