Kids & Parenting

Subtly And Not So Subtly Violent

by Terry Barlow
01/06/15
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I have a friend who recently remarked that the hectic pace of life in our post modern urban society is “violent.” The same night he mentioned this for the second time we were watching a bowl game on television where we commented that a particular crushing head on collision could have cost a particular player years off his life span, but oh how entertaining it was to the fans! (including ourselves) I concur that our culture is much better at detecting some forms of violence than other forms. In fact, it is curiously blind to examples of violence that are more convenient to its most popular lifestyles.

  Leave the kaleidoscopic world of television and film for a couple of months and then return and you will be stunned at how the hyper-violence has progressed under the veil of half consciousness, like the proverbial frog in heating water. Where is all this insidious gradualism headed we might ask? If the frog could talk, he would tell us. To the cooking of our consciences. We cannot assimilate maiming and killing on screen at such a frenetic rate and not see the out-workings of it in our surrounding communities, and especially in and by our impressionable youth.

 We are becoming more and more sensitized as a culture to domestic abuse and date rape to be specific (as well we should), but desensitized to the violence perpetrated against the unborn in the womb that goes unreported daily, even hourly, (nearly 330,000 by so called "Planned Parenthood" last year, which is somewhere in the neighborhood of an abortion every 90 seconds)  and those victims are even more vulnerable in that they are completely and helplessly defenseless and speechless. Who will speak up in their behalf?

  Another from of violence that is largely ignored because its bloodshed is invisible is that of divorce. Sacred bonds are ripped viciously and bloodlessly asunder when they are no longer as comfortable or conducive to selfish plans, no matter what vows were taken or promises made in a happier season of life. “I meant what I said then but this is now!” Can one’s word and one’s marriage (like one’s offspring) be thrown in the trash like a candy bar wrapper? Or, more aptly, litter the social landscape and devalue the “property” of our common moral heritage. Apparently so, and our legal system bends itself over backwards to accommodate it.

  Who hears the screams and the sobbing or sees the tears and brokenness of those warring interactions behind closed doors but the ones most directly impacted, who feel they must then choose sides in an embattled entity thalt wasn’t ever designed to have sides or battles.