The Walking Dead, Mad Men, Revenge, The X-men, 13 Assassins, Drive Angry, Switch Blade Sisters…
All these blood stained titles wink at me with appetite whetting action shots, seducing my testosterone, (yes, women have testosterone!), just beside the ad for Cornetto’s chocolate topped ice cream cones in the video store window. I’m remotely aware that the tooth rotting sweetness is somehow related to the movies.
I stop at a friend’s house. She’s not home, but her teenage son is. He is expertly multitasking. The room is commanded by a large flat screen in which he is a 3D sniper fighting to kill. ‘Just a minute’, he politely says from behind his back. He is shot dead. On the screen of course. No problem. His on-screen body instantly reemerges, in combat gear and armed, ready to begin again. While we chat about his mother’s return time he keeps his back to me, as if he were busy looking after a baby who might roll off the bed lest he divert his eyes.
Do Americans need to rethink gun laws after the Connecticut horror??? Are we arriving too late at the scene of the crime?
In the name of freedom we have shelves bulging with toy guns for Christmas; we feed our children the junk food of violence ‘entertainment’. We have an internet menu exploding with ‘hyperviolent action movies’, blood and murder and war…. games. We are breeding violence, grooming our youth for violence.
Not surprisingly there is a steeply rising incidence of youth violence and self harm, anxiety and suicide, depression and psychosis.
‘You are what you eat.’ ‘Children are our future.’
I have an idea. It’s not rocket science. Never buy or sell another gun ‘toy’. Or let’s just prohibit their manufacture if we must police the obvious. Remove all violent ‘entertainment’- games, TV shows, DVD’s from your home, shop, and internet usage. Or better yet, let’s just burn them in one big bonfire and chant PEACE, and mean it. Until we give up our addiction we continue to collude with the Machine and breed lack of empathy and compassion, two human qualities recognised as absent in those capable of perpetrating horrendous acts of violence. Let’s treat our children with the respect and guidance they deserve.
Oh, and let’s tighten gun laws too.
Cookie Jar -lyrics by Jack Johnson
To see all the other people, I don’t know what they mean.
And it was magic at first when they spoke without sound,
But now this world is gonna hurt.
You’d better turn that thing down.
Turn it around.
“Sure I pulled the trigger, but it needed to be done,
Because life’s been killing me ever since it begun.
You can’t blame me, ‘cuz I’m too young.””You can’t blame me; sure the killer was my son,
But I didn’t teach him to pull the trigger of the gun.
It’s the killing on this TV screen.
You can’t blame me; it’s those images he’s seen.”
“Well I wasn’t the one who came up with the plan.
And I just point my camera what the people want to see.
Man, it’s a two-way mirror and you can’t blame me.”“You can’t blame me,” says the singer of the song
Or the maker of the movie which he bases life on.
“It’s only entertainment and as anyone can see,
Its smoke machines and make up man, you can’t fool me.”It was you, it was me, it was every man.
We’ve all got the blood on our hands.
We only receive what we demand,
And if we want hell, then hell’s what we’ll have.And I would turn on the TV, but it’s so embarrassing.
To see all the other people, don’t even know what they mean
And it was magic at first, but let everyone down,
And now this world’s gonna hurt.
You’d better turn it around.
Turn it around.Deep respect and condolences to the families of those who have been killed in the countless acts of violence in 2012. And may those departed rest in peace.
