The Empire 433

The Cassandra Syndrome

Tuesday 14 April 2009

by: Michael N. Nagler, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

    Last month, 57 people lost their lives in eight mass shootings across America. "The killing grounds," Timothy Egan wrote in The New York Times last week, "include a nursing home, a center for new immigrants, a child's bedroom. Before that it was a church, a college, a daycare center." It is hard to argue when he calls this epidemic "the cancer at the core of our democracy."

    It's not that hard to understand why we're experiencing an upsurge in "senseless violence." More to the point, it isn't all that hard to see what we can do about it.

    This rash of killings was an uptick on a very general trend. That's important, because we don't want to just level out the trend that is already higher than any country calling itself civilized should put up with: we want it drastically lower. We want the killing to stop. It's not particularly easy to face why we've been inflicted with all this violence, but we must, because how else will we find a solution. And in the end, the solution may not be as unpleasant as we think.

    As a colleague of mine in Public Health recently declared, "We are increasing violence by every means possible." He was talking about the mass media. The enormously high, and increasing, level of violence in the "entertainment" industry - including the violent emphasis of the nightly news - makes violence seem normal, unavoidable, sexy and fun - even a source of meaning. The studies documenting this go back for decades, only lapsing for a while in the early eighties when scientists began to realize nobody was listening to them. They could say, as the US Surgeon General's Scientific Advisory Committee on Television and Social Behavior said in 1972, that the "preponderance of evidence" makes it very clear that television was already making young (and other) people more unfeeling and aggressive; they could complain about it in PTA meetings (as I have done) or shout it from the rooftops: neither policymakers nor producers nor us, the end consumers, paid much attention.

Lees verder: http://www.truthout.org/041409L