 "Photo: Graphic by Tiffany Tran, photo by Natasha Sankovich")
How many different ways could you kill a person if you wanted to? Odds are, you know more than one, thanks to television shows such as "CSI" and "Law and Order," or any number of the myriad spinoffs on their theme that pollute broadcast and cable television schedules. This is in addition, of course, to the hackneyed bust-a-cap method, which is still the mainstay of both real and portrayed violence.
Every time I hear my friends, or even strangers, talking about the gritty details of the latest murder on "CSI" or how many people they killed on "Grand Theft Auto IV" last night, which is often, I cringe a little, usually on the outside, and often visibly. Why? I hate to see people I know and care about hurting themselves like this.
What's the harm, you ask. Well, several things come to mind; the first of which is simply that absorbing images of violence begets more violence.
It is hard to deny that there is some correlation between the fictional images you absorb and the reality you project. Just as our bodies are what we eat, so too our minds are what we consume in the form of images, sounds and events. It is arrogant to assume we are above the influence of what we choose to do. Whether it is eating too much fast food, drinking too much alcohol, listening to 'music' that denigrates women or watching people kill each other on the tube, we become the product of our actions.
According to the American Psychological Association, people who watch more violence and aggression in their youth are more likely to be violent and aggressive as early as their 20s.
In a 15-year study published in 2003, L. Rowell Heusmann and others looked at the effects of childhood exposure to violence on television and came up with some alarming statistics. According to them, men who watched violent programs were "significantly more likely to have pushed, grabbed or shoved their spouses," and had three times the number of criminal convictions as other men in the study. Women were more likely to have thrown things at their spouses, and to have "punched, beaten or choked another adult" at four times the rate of other women in the study.
Besides leading to more aggression, the portrayal of fictional violence on television and in video games leads to a desensitization to violent images and a disassociation of other people from one's private reality. Unimpressed by the soon familiar scenario, the frequent viewer wants to see more details, more complicated methods of killing someone, it doesn't matter who. More blood, more dismembered corpses, more bullet wounds, more motives wash over the viewer.
Just like drunks who regale each other with the new levels of stupidity or slutiness reached in their latest bout, my friends and yours bring up how someone got away with bashing his girlfriend's head in or something like that, and we all become a little more comfortable with the idea of blasé violence.
Familiar with such discussions, tolerant of bloody images, the good Samaritan in us takes a back seat to the numb consumer of violence when we see someone in need, when we hear of a murder a few blocks from where we live or go to school. "Ha! Well he could have escaped if he'd been a little smarter. If I'd been in his position…."
Every time I cringe for these reasons, my mind turns to the Sermon on the Mount. "For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." How we spend our time, one of our greatest treasures, is reflected in our lives. We get to choose how to spend that time. We can let the latest entertaining homicide pour into our minds, try to find the hidden weapon on the secret level of our favorite game or we choose to pass time in uplifting activities.
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