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The Beginnings of Violence
Posted: Tuesday, October 25, 2005
By Linda E. Edwards
As we read of another murder in once-peaceful Tobago, I shudder at the thought of where we are going, as a people, not as people of TnT, not as African people, or Indian people, but as a human species. Violence is everywhere, and there is nowhere to turn.
If the current editors of the Express could locate a piece I wrote on teaching our children to kill for five dollars, the cost of a movie ticket in 1985, they are free to reprint it. Warnings that were ignored then, might still be ignored now, and I will not even say "I told you so". There can be no satisfaction in that, none whatsoever.
The country was awash then, in a tidal wave of violent movies. Children, I had pointed out, could learn how to stalk prey, garotte others, lie in wait and ambush to kill, all for the price of a ticket and in air-conditioned comfort. In the last twenty years, it has only gotten worse, on a global scale. Children now routinely expect violence in movies, action videos, sports events and game simulations. The twenty-something's and more mature mindless ones, have produced video game after video game- the more gruesome, the better; and parents have acceded to their children's requests, for fear of losing their love. As a result, we have produced a race of monsters ranging from ten to twenty-five or older for whom human life has absolutely no value.
The global village has become a global killing field.
Many of us of the older generation were shocked some years ago when a twelve year old gangster somewhere in the US dangled the little brother of a would be recruit from the upper floors of an apartment building, threatened to drop him, and followed up on his threat. We were shocked when Malcolm X's grandson set his grandmother, Betty Shabazz's apartment on fire because she insisted on a curfew for him. The resulting fire killed her.
So many young people have killed their grandparents since that, world-wide, that we have become numb, almost, to it. Trinidad joined the fray in the murder of Angela Cropper's mother by her grandson and an accomplice..
Is the situation going to get any better? I do not know. I recently changed jobs and now teach a group of thirteen-year-old Latin American kids, whose parents are all foreign born, and who, for socio-economic reasons seem to spend inordinate amounts of time being minded by that deadly baby-sitter, the TV set. In the first two weeks coming back from the summer holidays, they were all making gun-pointing signs at each other, using their hands. No, not in my room, I insisted. It was banned. They stopped doing it here, but the suppressed violence thrives in everything else they write.
Here are some suggestions from a bright seventh grader on what can be done about domestic violence:
1. We can stop the violence by destroying all the guns.
2. We can threaten people by telling them we will kill them if they use violence. *
3. We could put a big pillow in the house so when people get frustrated, they could hit he pillow.
4. Also, we could sacrifice a person by tying him to a pole, really hard, and handcuffing him. So when people get angry, they could pay one dollar to get a machine gun and shoot the person. The money will go to the family of the one who is getting shot and beat up.
I was so stunned at number four, that I was without words. This is a solution to domestic violence? First you threaten to kill, then you charge funds so that others can shoot and beat up on a person.
I asked him mildly if this was a possible solution if his beloved grandfather was the violent person in the home. He was silent. The term sacrifice one for the good of the others also occurred in another thirteen year old's paper? Coincidence? No, friends. Perhaps they had watched the same video together.
Today's entertainment offerings are full of blood sacrifices and evil, the bloodier, the better. The more ghoulish creatures rising from swamps, the more vampires, the more children love them. And the movie houses churn them out regularly. Our children have been eating this stuff up, for at least three decades now. Every movie full of rage and vendettas, boosts the sales of the particular weapon it features.
And yet, we persist in believing that these simulated acts of violence do not affect children in our innocent little republic.
Tell a child of a violent murder. It will frighten him or her for a while, then he begins to think that he would have escaped, or alternatively, that he would have planned it better. They do not think of consequences like justice or prison. They live in the now. For such children, sometimes living in the bodies of adults, simulated violence creates violent minds.
We need to be aware of that as we continue to destroy the minds of future generations with more garbage in the form of entertainment. Even The Passion of The Christ, catering to modern tastes, was far more violent than I think it had to be. Those were brutal times, no doubt, but does it do the young mind any good to have the ignorance and brutality of Rome in AD 30, brought home to him, up close?
Years ago, when Alex Haley's "Roots"s was showing, lot of young African Americans were lashing out at whites, because, for the first time, they saw up close, the violence meted out to their ancestors. It was too much to bear.
Military people, it is said, use mental images of the "enemy" doing unspeakable things to "our" women, in order to incense men to fight. And doctors provide porno movies to collect sperm. More examples of the power of visual images on male minds.
So, I sing a lament for Tobago's tranquility, which is taking a body blow this year. I lament for all those little pieces of paradise that we used to cling to in a world that was going crazy; but it is an engendered craziness, fostered by the things we call entertainment, death for profit at the box office, the cable channel, the video store extended to the global village. It is the saddest of all worlds into which we welcome the gift of new children to the family, and to the family of man.
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