We have noticed violence increase on TV, video games and movies over the years. It has been gradual but noticeable. Violence is so rampant in the media that we come to expect it. Yet is so strong that we have to numb ourselves to it in order to take such a heavy dose and not be overcome. At violence in the media increases we deaden our sensitivities to violence more and more. We must.
Sadly this deadening of senses to violence in media translates to our everyday lives. Local homicides hardly make the news anymore. Mass shootings in the USA are media news hits until the next one which is becoming to frequent. Mass killings in foreign countries like the USA Drone attack on wedding party in Yemen barely make the news. We expect and fear violence. Teaching violence and killing at Catholic Jesuit University like Marquette or Notre Dame seems to bother very few persons and gets ignored.
Leaders in our times, like Mandela, Gandhi, Martin Luther King tells us that violence breeds more violence and nonviolence is the only way to overcome violence. Yet our president, Republican or Democrat, spends more money on weapons of violence and involve us in violence all over the world. When there is a mass shooting in USA the president cries out how wrong it is and calls for ‘justice’, which means punishment and death for offender. Yet the next day the President sits in the oval office confirming a ‘kill list’ for the CIA and secret wars.
Soldiers are train to “kill or be killed’ and put in an environment which they must practice it. They are taught to fire to kill and then forget it. But when they come home they cannot forget. They are asked to put their morality and conscience aside in war and then pick it up once again at home.
Sexual violence reigns in the military and despite many efforts over many years to slow it down, in our culture of violence, it increases.
Recently Pope Francis gave us another statement of the root causes of violence, injustice. “But until exclusion and inequality in society and between peoples are reversed, it will be impossible to eliminate violence,” However, not many people, especially in the U.S.A. want to hear that message. The more wealth you have the better person you are in our culture and even in some religious beliefs. Yet it is the poor who are most blessed and to whom God gives his graces in our Gospel and teachings.
Until we Put the Poor on Top in our culture, violence will continue to reign in our media and in our lives.
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