General Discussion

It's the old 12 step thing. Step one is admitting the problem.

I can trace a wide variety of social problems back to the ingrained sense of justifiable violence in which our society accepts. Bullying, date rape, much of our foreign policy, police brutality, gun violence, road rage, torture, and in some sense it feeds our xenophobia and misogyny as well. Really, it is connected indirectly to our attitudes about "political correctness" in that we don't feel that we should have to be concerned about the safety (emotionally or otherwise) of other people.

Watching movies is getting harder to do anymore in that so many plot lines involve violence as entertainment. And we furthermore minimize the effects of violence by showing people being subjected to unsurvivable violence, and just getting up and walking away. Worse, the characters that are involved in extreme acts of violence, often forced upon them, and they "get over it" within the time frame of the movie (or even shorter for a TV show). Super heros are characters with expanded abilities to commit acts of violence. It all gives a highly distorted view of violence, its usefulness, and its consequences.

Not sure what it is going to take to move people away from this. Strangely, even though people accept violence, the majority rarely actually acts upon it. Yet we continue to accept the concept anyway.