THE DAY I KILLED MY BEST FRIEND
There are two wolves and they are always fighting. One is darkness and despair, the other is light and hope. Which wolf wins?
My twelve year old son exited the birthday celebrations, and climbed into the car seat next to me.
“So how was it?” I asked. “Did you have a good time?”
My son looked at me, took a deep breath, and replied, “Isn’t it strange, that as a way to celebrate my best friend’s birth and life, we spent the afternoon pretending to kill each other?”
Probably not the comment one would expect from a normal twelve year old coming out of a birthday celebration at a LASER TAG facility. But then again, I wouldn’t describe either of my sons as normal.
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In my teens, a typical weekend was spent with Arnold, Sylvester, and maybe the A-team.
Usually some goodies killing some baddies. The more baddies the better. Heck, the baddies didn’t even have character names most of the time, so they were just asking to be mowed down by the classic gun of choice: the M-16.
The fact that, after all these years, I still remember the make of the gun, more than the name of the actor who played “Howling Mad Murdock” in the A-team, is already pretty telling.
In short, violence in movies or TV was as normal as cornflakes for breakfast, and just as easy to swallow. As in Roman times, it was light entertainment, where lives have no purpose, apart from fighting and dying for our viewing pleasure.
As a parent of two young boys, and a newly minted American, I find myself talking more and more about violence, and how it invades every corner of our lives, without any significant objection.
When my sons were five and two years old, my wife and I made a rash, and some might think, crazy decision, to stop the use of screens. We noticed that after every round of cartoons, our children would tend to be more irritable.
So one day, we just stopped.
It was one month of pure hell.
Each day my eldest son would ask to watch his cartoons, to which I would make some quick excuse about the TV being broken, or the remote control being lost.
“But Mommy was watching TV last night,” he would protest.
“I know, weird right?” I would answer, before quickly changing the subject.
However after a month of begging and fighting, our sons gave us the metaphorical finger and said, “Well if you won’t to let us watch TV, then we are going to do something by ourselves,” before marching into the bedroom, slamming the door behind them, and playing with their wooden train set.
That was seven years ago. Ever since then, they have played “imagination”. They have developed passions for insects, seeds, and piano. The need for TV and screens was pushed further and further down the priority list without any further encouragement.
We made an agreement to watch a family movie at the weekends. When choosing these movies, my wife and I decided to preserve any childhood innocence by showing our sons as little unnecessary violence as possible.
In the 1980’s, violence was so normalized that most of the games we played as young boys, involved a stick that looked like a pistol, rifle, or bazooka, where we divided into two teams of assassins, hunting each other down until only one remained. Our heroes were anyone who could carry two of the largest guns at once, and tally the largest body count in one sitting.
Of course, the idolizing of action heroes is nothing new. For generations, we have told stories of heroes who destroyed the bad guys, but gradually our heroes became more bloodthirsty and apathetic to any life that they snuffed out.
A few months ago, both my sons came to me separately, lamenting that they sometimes felt left out from their friend groups at school, when they all started talking more and more about video games, killing zombies, and watching scary movies like “Scream” or “IT”.
Knowing and trusting my sons’ judgment, I asked them if they wanted to get a video game so that they could feel more included in their friend’s conversations.
They both looked indignantly at me, as if I had just asked them to strangle our dog.
“Why would we want to talk about killing as if it was a good thing?” my younger son said. What had been so normal for me as a child, was now so completely abnormal for my sons. Of course, the father in me glowed with pride at his answer, but still felt bad, that they were feeling left out.
I occasionally watch old 80’s movies with them, where any bloodshed used to wash so eerily and easily over me, but which now provokes comments from my children about how strangely violent they are.
Even the second Avatar movie was deemed by them as “very violent”. This brings me to a point about Avatar’s director, James Cameron, who I listened to on a podcast interview. The interviewer commented that Cameron must now enjoy complete creative control over anything he does.
Cameron’s response was surprising. He stated that even in Avatar 2, he had to fight with the studio to take out an extra 15 to 20 minutes of violent gun battle scenes. The studio wanted to keep it in; Cameron wanted it out, stating that the story didn’t require it, and that he didn’t want to further glorify gun violence.
With Avatar 2, as violent as it was, one has to ask the question, who are these people at the studio, so intent on keeping in unnecessary bloodshed? Is the thirst for ticket sales so great that they are willing to normalize, and even glorify killing, in the eyes of not only adults, but children too; further feeding into the epidemic of violence in today’s society.
In the book, “Soul Boom,” the author, Rainn Wilson, (of the sitcom “The Office”) describes how his production company approached Netflix, with an idea for a docuseries about how different people around the world perceived God in their varying cultures. Netflix came back with a refusal, saying that it was “too controversial.”
Wilson’s response was confusion, with the idea that “God” was too controversial, yet Netflix had no qualms about streaming innumerable shows and movies containing horrific abuse, rape, killing and explicit sexual content. Just no “God” stuff - way too dangerous.
This is the sad state of our society today, where violence is so accepted, that on a kid’s birthday, they are encouraged to pretend to kill each other all afternoon; when children at school, passing each other in the corridor, acknowledge one another, not with a high five or a wave, but instead a pistol shaped hand, pointing at each other and “blasting”.
And then we wonder why, with such carnage in video games, and the idolization of our favorite actors in ultra-violent movies, we have so much gun violence in the world; especially in this country, where “thoughts and prayers” are offered by people in power, as cures for the massacre of innocent children and bystanders, rather than imposing safe gun laws, or even looking at the way we prioritize brutality over compassion.
Is it all in our DNA? Are we simply predisposed to violence and negativity? In the book, “Stolen Focus”, author Johann Hari describes how, if given the choice of looking at a positive and happy picture, or one that has negative content, we will more than likely choose the latter. “If you were shown a picture of a crowd and some of the people were happy and some angry, you would instinctively pick out the angry faces first.” he writes.
This is called NEGATIVITY BIAS; a fact that internet companies exploit, by using shock factor tags as clickbait. Hari writes about the disturbing fact, that in order to get more views on your social media page, the top seven words to add to your title or tags are:
-HATE
-OBLITERATES
-SLAMS
-DESTROYS
-ATTACK
-BAD
-BLAME
I purposely chose the title, “THE DAY I KILLED MY BEST FRIEND” for this piece, to highlight this exact point, rather than using a more passive title such as, “PROTECTING OUR CHILDREN FROM MEDIA”.
So maybe it is not 100% our fault that we are susceptible to it. However, just because something is so easily digestible and tempting, does not mean we shouldn’t fight against it, when so detrimental to our physical, mental and emotional health. We have to protect our children.
My sons and I regularly talk about the use of violence and negativity in today’s media. My eldest summarized it as follows: “It’s as if your generation had poison leaking into your home water supply, and because you seemed to survive, you allow the same poison to drip into your children’s water supply, rather than remove it.” – A chilling perspective.
In answer to your probable questions; yes, my kids have laptop access now, where they use Google and YouTube to learn about ant’s mating schedules, how to grow vegetables in their bedrooms and which is the furthest galaxy or biggest black hole in the universe. Do they watch TV during the week? No. Is there any violence in the movies that they watch? Yes, but as little as possible, and if there is, it is used as a discussion point after the movie. Also, any new movie is run through the website: www.commonsensemedia.org.
Do we judge other parents who let their kids watch violence or play bloody video games? No. Every family has their own complex structure and it is not for us to judge, but simply to remind all of us to keep questioning all that we consider to be normal, and act if it needs to change.
We should be asking who is funding all the toy guns, violent video games and movies? When looking at a 70’s action movie and comparing it to one today, we can see the huge increase in violence. With the advent of CGI, filmmakers have been so busy making the action more extreme and exciting, that they never stopped to ask whether they even should, and what the cost to society would be.
Yes, the real world is out there and violence exists alongside hatred, but our children only have a few years to be kids, where they can form habits and create neural pathways that are predisposed to love and compassion, rather than violence and hate.
As the legend states:
There are two wolves and they are always fighting. One is darkness and despair, the other is light and hope. Which wolf wins?
The one that you feed.
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Thank you Zoe!! xx
love this Alexi - and so eloquently expressed .. very thought provoking..