Every Monday morning I make the half-hour hike from my residence to a local elementary school to teach conflict resolution to grade five students. It’s an amazing experience because, even more than the satisfaction that comes from teaching valuable life skills to children, the great benefit is how much you yourself learn.
Before I leave I look outside and realize that it’s kind of damp. Even though I decide to bring an umbrella, there isn’t really much point in using it; holding it would make my arm tired and it isn’t really raining, or even drizzling, it’s more like a light mist. As I walk I wonder how I should handle my part of today’s lesson: thinking critically about media. I had volunteered to discuss violence in video games because I love playing video games, but I’m really sure how to handle the issue. The curriculum seems to focus on making sure that the class understands the distinction between real violence and the fights in video games, but that seems a bit ridiculous to me, to think that ten year old can’t tell the difference between games and reality. I firmly believe that violence in media does affect people, just not necessarily in the sense of causal chains, like the ones that people concerned with media restrictions or censorship seem to believe in. I don’t think that fighting video games makes people more likely to use physical violence against others, and I especially don’t subscribe to the theory that people would think that fighting in real life is okay because in video games it doesn’t hurt anyone. No, people have enough common sense to draw the line between make believe and reality, but, then, why do we bother to discuss violence in media?
Then it hits me; the influence of media violence is a lot like walking in the rain, or at least, for people who wear glasses. The first raindrop on my glasses is really irritating; no matter how small the drop may be, or how little it affects my sight, my mind focuses on it and I feel compelled to wipe it off. As more tiny drops accumulate on my glasses, however, I stop caring. Each time I clean my glasses, more rain comes, so there’s not much point in trying to keep my glasses dry. Eventually I stop even noticing the rain on my glasses. Like the rain on glasses, the first exposure to violence produces a negative reaction, but the more the media exposes us to acts of violence, the more normal it becomes until it becomes barely noticeable. Once we lose that first feeling of “wrongness”, we also lose the immediate need to correct. It becomes normalized. Sure, “big” events like the September 11th attacks raise an outcry and demands to “stop terrorism,” just as a heavy rain would have prompted me to open my umbrella to prevent the rain from getting all over my glasses. Random shootings, senseless beatings, on the other hand, these things, like the little drops on my glasses, have become mere facts of life, sad but not necessarily things we need to deal with right now, things we can live with.
We have grown so complacent that we can accept all but the most senseless and brutal acts of violence as inevitable, maybe even natural occurrences in life. This should not be; we need to keep that initial sense of affront. All violence, no matter how minor, should offend. Not that a drunken brawl is the same thing as a suicide bombing, but that we should treat both events, as acts of violence with equal consideration, with the same depth of desire for prevention. Perhaps then we might progress towards a more peaceful world.
