Michael Swickard
I am concerned by Christmas gifts featuring violence for the sake of violence. The movies and games are aimed at young people. I remember years ago a six-year-old with an innocent angelic face. I was talking to his mother when I noticed him looking at a catalog. His birthday was coming so I asked him, “Do you see something you want for your birthday?”
He looked up and smiled broadly. “Yes,” he said, “I want this video game.”
From the description in the catalog, I was a little surprised because it was a game that seemed to be extremely violent, so I asked him, “Why this game?”
He smiled again, “It has the very best fatalities.”
“Excuse me?” Darn earwax, I must have heard wrong.
“This game has the very best fatalities,” he repeated.
His mother did not pay the slightest attention. “What are fatalities?” He looked up and said, “When people die.”
“What makes them the very best fatalities?”
He broke into a grin. “That is when the blood spurts out and their bones show and the skin burns off while they die.”
His mother gave me the “boys will be boys” look. Later I asked her if she thought it was good that a six-year-old wanted a game featuring death. She told me most young kids feel the same, which is why there are so many violent games on the market.
I persisted, “That begs the question. It does not matter that they like it, my question is if it is good for them.”
Entertainment industry promotes violence
There has been much concern about violence in our society. Some people think the escalating violence is caused by a lack of communication. I believe we have so much violence because many Americans like violence. The enjoyment of violence, for itself, is a product of the American entertainment industry.
Violence in America is promulgated by those people who find violence enjoyable. Much of the violence in America happens because the perpetrator simply felt like hurting someone. Guns and knives are not the cause; rather, the source is the sickness of enjoyed violence within our society.
There are gentle people and violent people here in America. It is hard to spot any difference in their appearance. The lambs and lions look alike. They lay down together but only one gets up. The difference is that lions enjoy the violence while the lambs do not.
I accept that there are times in our lives when violence may be the only option. Still, much of the violence in our society is not needed; it is promoted as personal enjoyment. Even after thousands of years of human intellectual advancement, the same blood lust central to the society that enjoyed going to the Roman Coliseum to watch gladiators kill each other is alive and well in our own society.
Can we lump those who enjoy watching violence with those who enjoy doing violence? Research certainly does suggest strongly that there is a connection. What is experienced abstractly in a movie theater is often repeated in life. The people who enjoy watching violence may not always commit violence, but statistics indicate that as more people watch violence, we have more violent crime.
The reason gangs all over America look and act like gangs in Los Angeles is they are copying what they have seen on television. Do gangs kill people because they have to or because they want to? It is their blood lust that drives the violence. They enjoy doing it.
I suspect the government cannot change this, only each of us can protest with our friends. At least we can try. Some people want laws keeping violent games from kids, but these are already in effect. There are rating systems, and movie theaters make sure kids do not see “mature content.”
The system breaks down with parents allowing children access to these materials. They say when they were children they played cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, etc., and see how they turned out?But they did not revel in violence for violence sake like this generation.
‘I know it when I see it’
President Theodore Roosevelt liked to say, “If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn’t sit for a month.” Amen, we know where to look for the problem. It would seem that is where we must look for a solution.
I cannot see a nanny state screening content specific to each child, as much as the nanny state would like that much control. One approach would be to (gasp) ban certain media content, but can we legally define inappropriate violence? We have been in these waters before with the issue of pornography. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart wrote in Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964), “I can’t define pornography, but I know it when I see it.”
In a few years the young boy who likes the very best fatalities in movies and games may move from the abstract deaths in a video game to the real life deaths of people on the streets. At the murder trial a lawyer may call his mother to the stand. She will have to admit that she allowed her son to devalue life by letting him learn to enjoy violence.
Society will then have to decide what to do with him once it is established by his testimony how much he really enjoys the very best fatalities.
Swickard is a weekly columnist for this site. You can reach him at michael@swickard.com.
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