A Depraved, Violent and Indifferent Culture

"It is not a sign of good health to be well adjusted to a sick society." ~ J. Krishnamurti (1895-1986)

I earlier linked to a video of the Meyer incident, but that link doesn't work any longer. Here's one that does. I suggest you view it several times, as difficult as it is. If you keep in mind that Meyer could have been killed, it's almost impossible to watch. As I noted at the time, one of the most horrifying aspects of the Meyer tasering is that a sizable audience watched it occur just feet away -- and with only a few exceptions, no one did anything to stop it.

That is only the beginning of the similarities between the Meyer incident and the recent gang rape of the young girl. As I watched the video of Meyer's tasering again, these details leapt out at me. When security personnel begin to move Meyer to the back of auditorium, some audience members applaud, just as some of the onlookers cheered the ongoing rape in this recent story. Remember what they were applauding: violent sons of bitches, acting under color of law, dragging away a lone young, harmless man for asking a few questions. Many in the audience thought this a cause of celebration.

Moments later, you hear one woman say, horror in her voice, "They have a taser on his chest." A couple of people scream when the tasering begins -- but other than that, no one did a damned thing. Meyer might have been murdered -- and no one did a damned thing. The ungraspable horror is underscored when, throughout all of this, Kerry's lifeless monotone drones on and on and on, as if absolutely nothing is happening of any significance. See the connection: our government, of which Kerry has long been a part, murders hundreds of thousands of innocent people, even over a million in a monstrous genocide, and Kerry and almost everyone else in the government (including the current president) support it. As my earlier essays demonstrate, it is far from the first time our government has acted in this manner, and it very well may do so again. On what grounds do you expect any of them to give a damn when an innocent human being may be murdered directly in front of them?

The Huffington Post article mentions the possibility that the prevalence of violence against women on television has desensitized people to such an extent that they fail to act when similar violence occurs directly before them in real life. I think the problem is worse than that. I've sometimes noted that our systematic denial has moved us so far from reality that what happens on television seems more real to many people than events in their own lives. I now think that isn't quite exact. I would rephrase the point this way, to make it more accurate: unless something happens on television, it isn't fully real. Period, full stop. It isn't that such people are clinically insane, in the sense that all their connections to reality are severed. Clearly, that isn't the case. But there is a sense in which many people connect much more, certainly in emotional terms, to events on television than they do in response to what happens to them, and to the events in which they take part.

At the same time, they think that what they see on television isn't fully "real" either, even when news events are reported. So reality -- and the actual events that happen to actual, breathing (and often dying) human beings -- are banished in large part across the board. Thus, the United States government unleashes a genocide -- and for the most part, people do nothing. The deaths of innocents in Afghanistan and Pakistan increase -- and people do nothing. Here at home, the most basic protections of individual liberty are systematically eroded and even obliterated, under Obama as under Bush -- and people do nothing.

None of it is fully real, none of it matters in a way that causes people to resist in meaningful ways. Moreover, any signs of decency, of compassion and empathy, of being willing to say, No, and to mean it, any signs of healthy, vital life are ignored or, still worse, sneered at and made the target of mockery. (For much more on that last issue, see the discussion of high school students who peacefully protested the Iraq occupation and were then threatened with severe punishment, including expulsion, in "When Awareness Is a Crime, and Other Lessons from Morton West.")

In the most crucial sense, this is not a culture that deserves to survive. In all those ways that are conducive to fulfillment and joy, those ways that concern the sanctity of life and the possibility of happiness, such a culture is already dead.

For those who genuinely wish to begin to change this, I can only repeat what I said at the conclusion of one of my earlier essays:

But, many people will say, this is monstrous. We must teach these children that such behavior is deeply wrong, and that they must change. To all such people, I reply: Then change yourselves. Change your values, and change the way you think and act. Children will see those changes, and their own behavior will alter accordingly in time.

Change yourselves. Start today. Start right now.

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