Car bomb kills 16.
Genocidal ruler sentenced to life.
16 year old raped by 30 men.
Missile hits Doctors Beyond Borders hospital.
Germany takes in nearly half million migrants.
Genocidal ruler sentenced to life.
16 year old raped by 30 men.
Missile hits Doctors Beyond Borders hospital.
Germany takes in nearly half million migrants.
How are these today’s headlines? We expect the natural disasters to a certain extent. But willful violence on this proportion is incredibly difficult to quantify, so being thousands of miles away, it’s equally quite “tuckable” to deeper recesses of the brain; if nothing else, due to a natural dissonance between what we hear and what we can emotionally comprehend.
Violence is something I’ve understood from childhood having lived in a part of a city where the wrong word and seeing the wrong thing can cause things to go very poorly. Somehow, the visceral hate for hate’s sake that we as a world have been witnessing has been far more potent for me. In reading Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature, I’ve come to realize that much of the perception of increased violence is due to our pervasive citizen journalism, social media, and moment-to-moment news, which is a phenomenal development for our continual self-awareness as civilization.
It’s been six months since my (then) 8 year old daughter and I witnessed the terrorist attacks in Paris, and in that siren filled night, that dissonance that I mentioned started closing.
However, time away from such feelings blunts the urgency and provides a security blanket. I discovered how false that mental security blanket was when one of the acts of a show I was attending took a turn that I would have viewed through more naïve eyes previously.
Exploding onto the platform was two henchmen backed by James Bond music. The M16s were obviously fake, yet my blood instantly went cold as I tried to breathe. Then James Bond himself came out flashing a Glock in time with the music, dancing about as if there was great fun. All I could see in my head were bullet holes and glass. The henchmen bend down to “check out the crowd” aiming their weapons at us. Everybody cheers for reasons I can’t comprehend because am I can only see the Kalashnikovs brandished by the French soldiers … everywhere.
Then, the pièce de résistance … a cardboard cutout of Donald Trump hits the stage and James Bond takes aim.
Perhaps I could have made more sense of it if the guy sitting next me wasn’t screaming at the top of his lungs ….
SHOOT THE FUCKER!!!!!!!!
… over and over and over and over again.
Flashes of two second scenes crashed into me of what it might have been like at riots or violent political rallies. Then oddly, out of no-where, I felt that thudding music from The Lord of the Rings when Théoden said so calmly as the hopelessly overwhelming army of uruk-hai came to destroy everything:
“…and so it begins.”
Only this violence isn’t from creatures made from evil. It’s simply our neighbors. It’s us when we lose objectively and let our fear control us.
