(1) Are We Training Our Children to Kill?
I am from Jonesboro, Arkansas. I travel the world training medical, law enforcement,
and U.S. military personnel about the realities of warfare. I try to make those
who carry deadly force keenly aware of the magnitude of killing. Too many law
enforcement and military personnel act like "cowboys," never stopping
to think about who they are and what they are called to do. I hope I am able
to give them a reality check.
So here I am, a world traveler and an expert in the field of "killology,"
and the largest school massacre in American history happens in my hometown of
Jonesboro, Arkansas. That was the March 24 schoolyard shooting deaths of four
girls and a teacher. Ten others were injured, and two boys, ages 11 and 13,
are in jail, charged with murder.
My son goes to one of the middle schools in town, so my aunt in Florida called
us that day and asked, "Was that Joe's school?" And we said, "We
haven't heard about it." My aunt in Florida knew about the shootings before
we did!
We turned on the television and discovered the shootings took place down the
road from us but, thank goodness, not at Joe's school. I'm sure almost all parents
in Jonesboro that night hugged their children and said, "Thank God it wasn't
you," as they tucked them into bed. But there was also a lot of guilt because
some parents in Jonesboro couldn't say that.
I spent the first three days after the tragedy at Westside Middle School, where
the shootings took place, working with the counselors, teachers, students, and
parents. None of us had ever done anything like this before. I train people
how to react to trauma in the military; but how do you do it with kids after
a massacre in their school?
I was the lead trainer for the counselors and clergy the night after the shootings,
and the following day we debriefed the teachers in groups. Then the counselors
and clergy, working with the teachers, debriefed the students, allowing them
to work through everything that had happened. Only people who share a trauma
can give each other the understanding, acceptance, and forgiveness needed to
understand what happened, and then they can begin the long process of trying
to understand why it happened.
(2) Virus of Violence
To understand the why behind Jonesboro and Springfield and Pearl and Paducah,
and all the other outbreaks of this "virus of violence," we need to
understand first the magnitude of the problem. The per capita murder rate doubled
in this country between 1957--when the FBI started keeping track of the data--and
1992. A fuller picture of the problem, however, is indicated by the rate people
are attempting to kill one another--the aggravated assault rate. That rate in
America has gone from around 60 per 100,000 in 1957 to over 440 per 100,000
by the middle of this decade. As bad as this is, it would be much worse were
it not for two major factors.
First is the increase in the imprisonment rate of violent offenders. The prison
population in America nearly quadrupled between 1975 and 1992. According to
criminologist John J. DiIulio, "dozens of credible empirical analyses .
. . leave no doubt that the increased use of prisons averted millions of serious
crimes." If it were not for our tremendous imprisonment rate (the highest
of any industrialized nation), the aggravated assault rate and the murder rate
would undoubtedly be even higher.
The second factor keeping the murder rate from being any worse is medical technology.
According to the U.S. Army Medical Service Corps, a wound that would have killed
nine out of 10 soldiers in World War II, nine out of 10 could have survived
in Vietnam. Thus, by a very conservative estimate, if we had 1940-level medical
technology today, the murder rate would be ten times higher than it is. The
magnitude of the problem has been held down by the development of sophisticated
lifesaving skills and techniques, such as helicopter medevacs, 911 operators,
paramedics, cpr, trauma centers, and medicines.
However, the crime rate is still at a phenomenally high level, and this is
true worldwide. In Canada, according to their Center for Justice, per capita
assaults increased almost fivefold between 1964 and 1993, attempted murder increased
nearly sevenfold, and murders doubled. Similar trends can be seen in other countries
in the per capita violent crime rates reported to Interpol between 1977 and
1993. In Australia and New Zealand, the assault rate increased approximately
fourfold, and the murder rate nearly doubled in both nations. The assault rate
tripled in Sweden, and approximately doubled in Belgium, Denmark, England-Wales,
France, Hungary, Netherlands, and Scotland, while all these nations had an associated
(but smaller) increase in murder.
This virus of violence is occurring worldwide. The explanation for it has to
be some new factor that is occurring in all of these countries. There are many
factors involved, and none should be discounted: for example, the prevalence
of guns in our society. But violence is rising in many nations with draco-nian
gun laws. And though we should never downplay child abuse, poverty, or racism,
there is only one new variable present in each of these countries, bearing the
exact same fruit: media violence presented as entertainment for children.
(3) Killing is Unnatural
Before retiring from the military, I spent almost a quarter of a century as
an army infantry officer and a psychologist, learning and studying how to enable
people to kill. Believe me, we are very good at it. But it does not come naturally;
you have to be taught to kill. And just as the army is conditioning people to
kill, we are indiscriminately doing the same thing to our children, but without
the safeguards.
After the Jonesboro killings, the head of the American Academy of Pediatrics
Task Force on Juvenile Violence came to town and said that children don't naturally
kill. It is a learned skill. And they learn it from abuse and violence in the
home and, most pervasively, from violence as entertainment in television, the
movies, and interactive video games.
Killing requires training because there is a built-in aversion to killing one's
own kind. I can best illustrate this from drawing on my own work in studying
killing in the military.
We all know that you can't have an argument or a discussion with a frightened
or angry human being. Vasoconstriction, the narrowing of the blood vessels,
has literally closed down the forebrain--that great gob of gray matter that
makes you a human being and distinguishes you from a dog. When those neurons
close down, the midbrain takes over and your thought processes and reflexes
are indistinguishable from your dog's. If you've worked with animals, you have
some understanding of what happens to frightened human beings on the battlefield.
The battlefield and violent crime are in the realm of midbrain responses.
Within the midbrain there is a powerful, God-given resistance to killing your
own kind. Every species, with a few exceptions, has a hardwired resistance to
killing its own kind in territorial and mating battles. When animals with antlers
and horns fight one another, they head butt in a harmless fashion. But when
they fight any other species, they go to the side to gut and gore. Piranhas
will turn their fangs on anything, but they fight one another with flicks of
the tail. Rattlesnakes will bite anything, but they wrestle one another. Almost
every species has this hardwired resistance to killing its own kind.
When we human beings are overwhelmed with anger and fear, we slam head-on into
that midbrain resistance that generally prevents us from killing. Only sociopaths--who
by definition don't have that resistance--lack this innate violence immune system.
Throughout human history, when humans fight each other, there is a lot of posturing.
Adversaries make loud noises and puff themselves up, trying to daunt the enemy.
There is a lot of fleeing and submission. Ancient battles were nothing more
than great shoving matches. It was not until one side turned and ran that most
of the killing happened, and most of that was stabbing people in the back. All
of the ancient military historians report that the vast majority of killing
happened in pursuit when one side was fleeing.
In more modern times, the average firing rate was incredibly low in Civil War
battles. Patty Griffith demonstrates that the killing potential of the average
Civil War regiment was anywhere from five hundred to a thousand men per minute.
The actual killing rate was only one or two men per minute per regiment (The
Battle Tactics of the American Civil War). At the Battle of Gettysburg, of the
27,000 muskets picked up from the dead and dying after the battle, 90 percent
were loaded. This is an anomaly, because it took 95 percent of their time to
load muskets and only 5 percent to fire. But even more amazingly, of the thousands
of loaded muskets, over half had multiple loads in the barrel--one with 23 loads
in the barrel.
In reality, the average man would load his musket and bring it to his shoulder,
but he could not bring himself to kill. He would be brave, he would stand shoulder
to shoulder, he would do what he was trained to do; but at the moment of truth,
he could not bring himself to pull the trigger. And so he lowered the weapon
and loaded it again. Of those who did fire, only a tiny percentage fired to
hit. The vast majority fired over the enemy's head.
During World War II, U.S. Army Brig. Gen. S. L. A. Marshall had a team of researchers
study what soldiers did in battle. For the first time in history, they asked
individual soldiers what they did in battle. They discovered that only 15 to
20 percent of the individual riflemen could bring themselves to fire at an exposed
enemy soldier.
That is the reality of the battlefield. Only a small percentage of soldiers
are able and willing to participate. Men are willing to die, they are willing
to sacrifice themselves for their nation; but they are not willing to kill.
It is a phenomenal insight into human nature; but when the military became aware
of that, they systematically went about the process of trying to fix this "problem."
From the military perspective, a 15 percent firing rate among riflemen is like
a 15 percent literacy rate among librarians. And fix it the military did. By
the Korean War, around 55 percent of the soldiers were willing to fire to kill.
And by Vietnam, the rate rose to more than 90 percent.
(4) Methods in This Madness: Desensitization
How the military increases the killing rate of soldiers in combat is instructive,
because our culture today is doing the same thing to our children. The training
methods militaries use are brutalization, classical conditioning, operant conditioning,
and role modeling. I will explain these in the military context and show how
these same factors are contributing to the phenomenal increase of violence in
our culture.
Brutalization and desensitization are what happens at boot camp. From the moment
you step off the bus you are physically and verbally abused: countless pushups,
endless hours at attention or running with heavy loads, while carefully trained
professionals take turns screaming at you. Your head is shaved, you are herded
together naked and dressed alike, losing all individuality. This brutalization
is designed to break down your existing mores and norms and to accept a new
set of values that embrace destruction, violence, and death as a way of life.
In the end, you are desensitized to violence and accept it as a normal and essential
survival skill in your brutal new world.
Something very similar to this desensitization toward violence is happening
to our children through violence in the media--but instead of 18-year-olds,
it begins at the age of 18 months when a child is first able to discern what
is happening on television. At that age, a child can watch something happening
on television and mimic that action. But it isn't until children are six or
seven years old that the part of the brain kicks in that lets them understand
where information comes from. Even though young children have some understanding
of what it means to pretend, they are developmentally unable to distinguish
clearly between fantasy and reality.
When young children see somebody shot, stabbed, raped, brutalized, degraded,
or murdered on TV, to them it is as though it were actually happening. To have
a child of three, four, or five watch a "splatter" movie, learning
to relate to a character for the first 90 minutes and then in the last 30 minutes
watch helplessly as that new friend is hunted and brutally murdered is the moral
and psychological equivalent of introducing your child to a friend, letting
her play with that friend, and then butchering that friend in front of your
child's eyes. And this happens to our children hundreds upon hundreds of times.
Sure, they are told: "Hey, it's all for fun. Look, this isn't real, it's
just TV." And they nod their little heads and say okay. But they can't
tell the difference. Can you remember a point in your life or in your children's
lives when dreams, reality, and television were all jumbled together? That's
what it is like to be at that level of psychological development. That's what
the media are doing to them.
The Journal of the American Medical Association published the definitive epidemiological
study on the impact of TV violence. The research demonstrated what happened
in numerous nations after television made its appearance as compared to nations
and regions without TV. The two nations or regions being compared are demographically
and ethnically identical; only one variable is different: the presence of television.
In every nation, region, or city with television, there is an immediate explosion
of violence on the playground, and within 15 years there is a doubling of the
murder rate. Why 15 years? That is how long it takes for the brutalization of
a three- to five-year-old to reach the "prime crime age." That is
how long it takes for you to reap what you have sown when you brutalize and
desensitize a three-year-old.
Today the data linking violence in the media to violence in society are superior
to those linking cancer and tobacco. Hundreds of sound scientific studies demonstrate
the social impact of brutalization by the media. The Journal of the American
Medical Association concluded that "the introduction of television in the
1950's caused a subsequent doubling of the homicide rate, i.e., long-term childhood
exposure to television is a causal factor behind approximately one half of the
homicides committed in the United States, or approximately 10,000 homicides
annually." The article went on to say that ". . . if, hypothetically,
television technology had never been developed, there would today be 10,000
fewer homicides each year in the United States, 70,000 fewer rapes, and 700,000
fewer injurious assaults" (June 10, 1992).
(5) Classical Conditioning
Classical conditioning is like the famous case of Pavlov's dogs you learned
about in Psychology 101: The dogs learned to associate the ringing of the bell
with food, and, once conditioned, the dogs could not hear the bell without salivating.
The Japanese were masters at using classical conditioning with their soldiers.
Early in World War II, Chinese prisoners were placed in a ditch on their knees
with their hands bound behind them. And one by one, a select few Japanese soldiers
would go into the ditch and bayonet "their" prisoner to death. This
is a horrific way to kill another human being. Up on the bank, countless other
young soldiers would cheer them on in their violence. Comparatively few soldiers
actually killed in these situations, but by making the others watch and cheer,
the Japanese were able to use these kinds of atrocities to classically condition
a very large audience to associate pleasure with human death and suffering.
Immediately afterwards, the soldiers who had been spectators were treated to
sake, the best meal they had had in months, and to so-called comfort girls.
The result? They learned to associate committing violent acts with pleasure.
The Japanese found these kinds of techniques to be extraordinarily effective
at quickly enabling very large numbers of soldiers to commit atrocities in the
years to come. Operant conditioning (which we will look at shortly) teaches
you to kill, but classical conditioning is a subtle but powerful mechanism that
teaches you to like it.
This technique is so morally reprehensible that there are very few examples
of it in modern U.S. military training; but there are some clear-cut examples
of it being done by the media to our children. What is happening to our children
is the reverse of the aversion therapy portrayed in the movie A Clockwork Orange.
In A Clockwork Orange, a brutal sociopath, a mass murderer, is strapped to a
chair and forced to watch violent movies while he is injected with a drug that
nauseates him. So he sits and gags and retches as he watches the movies. After
hundreds of repetitions of this, he associates violence with nausea, and it
limits his ability to be violent.
We are doing the exact opposite: Our children watch vivid pictures of human
suffering and death, and they learn to associate it with their favorite soft
drink and candy bar, or their girlfriend's perfume.
After the Jonesboro shootings, one of the high-school teachers told me how
her students reacted when she told them about the shootings at the middle school.
"They laughed," she told me with dismay. A similar reaction happens
all the time in movie theaters when there is bloody violence. The young people
laugh and cheer and keep right on eating popcorn and drinking pop. We have raised
a generation of barbarians who have learned to associate violence with pleasure,
like the Romans cheering and snacking as Christians were slaughtered in the
Colosseum.
The result is a phenomenon that functions much like AIDS, which I call AVIDS--Acquired
Violence Immune Deficiency Syndrome. AIDS has never killed anybody. It destroys
your immune system, and then other diseases that shouldn't kill you become fatal.
Television violence by itself does not kill you. It destroys your violence immune
system and conditions you to derive pleasure from violence. And once you are
at close range with another human being, and it's time for you to pull that
trigger, Acquired Violence Immune Deficiency Syndrome can destroy your midbrain
resistance.
(6) Operant Conditioning
The third method the military uses is operant conditioning, a very powerful
procedure of stimulus-response, stimulus-response. A benign example is the use
of flight simulators to train pilots. An airline pilot in training sits in front
of a flight simulator for endless hours; when a particular warning light goes
on, he is taught to react in a certain way. When another warning light goes
on, a different reaction is required. Stimulus-response, stimulus-response,
stimulus-response. One day the pilot is actually flying a jumbo jet; the plane
is going down, and 300 people are screaming behind him. He is wetting his seat
cushion, and he is scared out of his wits; but he does the right thing. Why?
Because he has been conditioned to respond reflexively to this particular crisis.
When people are frightened or angry, they will do what they have been conditioned
to do. In fire drills, children learn to file out of the school in orderly fashion.
One day there is a real fire, and they are frightened out of their wits; but
they do exactly what they have been conditioned to do, and it saves their lives.
The military and law enforcement community have made killing a conditioned
response. This has substantially raised the firing rate on the modern battlefield.
Whereas infantry training in World War II used bull's-eye targets, now soldiers
learn to fire at realistic, man-shaped silhouettes that pop into their field
of view. That is the stimulus. The trainees have only a split second to engage
the target. The conditioned response is to shoot the target, and then it drops.
Stimulus-response, stimulus-response, stimulus-response--soldiers or police
officers experience hundreds of repetitions. Later, when soldiers are on the
battlefield or a police officer is walking a beat and somebody pops up with
a gun, they will shoot reflexively and shoot to kill. We know that 75 to 80
percent of the shooting on the modern battlefield is the result of this kind
of stimulus-response training.
Now, if you're a little troubled by that, how much more should we be troubled
by the fact that every time a child plays an interactive point-and-shoot video
game, he is learning the exact same conditioned reflex and motor skills.
I was an expert witness in a murder case in South Carolina offering mitigation
for a kid who was facing the death penalty. I tried to explain to the jury that
interactive video games had conditioned him to shoot a gun to kill. He had spent
hundreds of dollars on video games learning to point and shoot, point and shoot.
One day he and his buddy decided it would be fun to rob the local convenience
store. They walked in, and he pointed a snub-nosed .38 pistol at the clerk's
head. The clerk turned to look at him, and the defendant shot reflexively from
about six feet. The bullet hit the clerk right between the eyes--which is a
pretty remarkable shot with that weapon at that range--and killed this father
of two. Afterward, we asked the boy what happened and why he did it. It clearly
was not part of the plan to kill the guy--it was being videotaped from six different
directions. He said, "I don't know. It was a mistake. It wasn't supposed
to happen."
In the military and law-enforcement worlds, the right option is often not to
shoot. But you never, never put your quarter in that video machine with the
intention of not shooting. There is always some stimulus that sets you off.
And when he was excited, and his heart rate went up, and vasoconstriction closed
his forebrain down, this young man did exactly what he was conditioned to do:
he reflexively pulled the trigger, shooting accurately just like all those times
he played video games.
This process is extraordinarily powerful and frightening. The result is ever
more homemade pseudosociopaths who kill reflexively and show no remorse. Our
children are learning to kill and learning to like it; and then we have the
audacity to say, "Oh my goodness, what's wrong?"
One of the boys allegedly involved in the Jonesboro shootings (and they are
just boys) had a fair amount of experience shooting real guns. The other one
was a nonshooter and, to the best of our knowledge, had almost no experience
shooting. Between them, those two boys fired 27 shots from a range of over 100
yards, and they hit 15 people. That's pretty remarkable shooting. We run into
these situations often--kids who have never picked up a gun in their lives pick
up a real gun and are incredibly accurate. Why? Video games.
(7) Role Models
In the military, you are immediately confronted with a role model: your drill
sergeant. He personifies violence and aggression. Along with military heroes,
these violent role models have always been used to influence young, impressionable
minds.
Today the media are providing our children with role models, and this can be
seen not just in the lawless sociopaths in movies and TV shows, but it can also
be seen in the media-inspired, copycat aspects of the Jonesboro murders. This
is the part of these juvenile crimes that the TV networks would much rather
not talk about.
Research in the 1970s demonstrated the existence of "cluster suicides"
in which the local TV reporting of teen suicides directly caused numerous copycat
suicides of impressionable teenagers. Somewhere in every population there are
potentially suicidal kids who will say to themselves, "Well, I'll show
all those people who have been mean to me. I know how to get my picture on TV,
too." Because of this research, television stations today generally do
not cover suicides. But when the pictures of teenage killers appear on TV, the
effect is the same: Somewhere there is a potentially violent little boy who
says to himself, "Well, I'll show all those people who have been mean to
me. I know how to get my picture on TV too."
Thus we get copycat, cluster murders that work their way across America like
a virus spread by the six o'clock news. No matter what someone has done, if
you put his picture on TV, you have made him a celebrity, and someone, somewhere,
will emulate him.
The lineage of the Jonesboro shootings began at Pearl, Mississippi, fewer than
six months before. In Pearl, a 16-year-old boy was accused of killing his mother
and then going to his school and shooting nine students, two of whom died, including
his ex-girlfriend. Two months later, this virus spread to Paducah, Kentucky,
where a 14-year-old boy was arrested for killing three students and wounding
five others.
A very important step in the spread of this copycat crime virus occurred in
Stamps, Arkansas, 15 days after Pearl and just a little over 90 days before
Jonesboro. In Stamps, a 14-year-old boy, who was angry at his schoolmates, hid
in the woods and fired at children as they came out of school. Sound familiar?
Only two children were injured in this crime, so most of the world didn't hear
about it; but it got great regional coverage on TV, and two little boys in Jonesboro,
Arkansas, probably did hear about it.
And then there was Springfield, Oregon, and so many others. Is this a reasonable
price to pay for the TV networks' "right" to turn juvenile defendants
into celebrities and role models by playing up their pictures on TV?
Our society needs to be informed about these crimes, but when the images of
the young killers are broadcast on television, they become role models. The
average preschooler in America watches 27 hours of television a week. The average
child gets more one-on-one communication from TV than from all her parents and
teachers combined. The ultimate achievement for our children is to get their
picture on TV. The solution is simple, and it comes straight out of the suicidology
literature: The media have every right and responsibility to tell the story,
but they have no right to glorify the killers by presenting their images on
TV.
(8) Unlearning Violence
What is the road home from the dark and lonely place to which we have traveled?
One route infringes on civil liberties. The city of New York has made remarkable
progress in recent years in bringing down crime rates, but they may have done
so at the expense of some civil liberties. People who are fearful say that is
a price they are willing to pay.
Another route would be to "just turn it off"; if you don't like what
is on television, use the "off" button. Yet, if all the parents of
the 15 shooting victims in Jonesboro had protected their children from TV violence,
it wouldn't have done a bit of good. Because somewhere there were two little
boys whose parents didn't "just turn it off."
On the night of the Jonesboro shootings, clergy and counselors were working
in small groups in the hospital waiting room, comforting the groups of relatives
and friends of the victims. Then they noticed one woman sitting alone silently.
A counselor went over to the woman and discovered that she was the mother of
one of the girls who had been killed. She had no friends, no husband, no family
with her as she sat in the hospital, stunned by her loss. "I just came
to find out how to get my little girl's body back," she said. But the body
had been taken to Little Rock, 100 miles away, for an autopsy. Her very next
concern was, "I just don't know how I'm going to pay for the funeral. I
don't know how I can afford it." That little girl was truly all she had
in all the world. Come to Jonesboro, friend, and tell this mother she should
"just turn it off."
Another route to reduced violence is gun control. I don't want to downplay
that option, but America is trapped in a vicious cycle when we talk about gun
control. Americans don't trust the government; they believe that each of us
should be responsible for taking care of ourselves and our families. That's
one of our great strengths--but it is also a great weakness. When the media
foster fear and perpetuate a milieu of violence, Americans arm themselves in
order to deal with that violence. And the more guns there are out there, the
more violence there is. And the more violence there is, the greater the desire
for guns.
We are trapped in this spiral of self-dependence and lack of trust. Real progress
will never be made until we reduce this level of fear. As a historian, I tell
you it will take decades--maybe even a century--before we wean Americans off
their guns. And until we reduce the level of fear and of violent crime, Americans
would sooner die than give up their guns.
(9) Fighting Back
We need to make progress in the fight against child abuse, racism, and poverty,
and in rebuilding our families. No one is denying that the breakdown of the
family is a factor. But nations without our divorce rates are also having increases
in violence. Besides, research demonstrates that one major source of harm associated
with single-parent families occurs when the TV becomes both the nanny and the
second parent.
Work is needed in all these areas, but there is a new front--taking on the
producers and purveyers of media violence. Simply put, we ought to work toward
legislation that outlaws violent video games for children. There is no constitutional
right for a child to play an interactive video game that teaches him weapons-handling
skills or that simulates destruction of God's creatures.
The day may also be coming when we are able to seat juries in America who are
willing to sock it to the networks in the only place they really understand--their
wallets. After the Jonesboro shootings, Time magazine said: "As for media
violence, the debate there is fast approaching the same point that discussions
about the health impact of tobacco reached some time ago--it's over. Few researchers
bother any longer to dispute that bloodshed on TV and in the movies has an effect
on kids who witness it" (April 6, 1998).
Most of all, the American people need to learn the lesson of Jonesboro: Violence
is not a game; it's not fun, it's not something that we do for entertainment.
Violence kills.
Every parent in America desperately needs to be warned of the impact of TV
and other violent media on children, just as we would warn them of some widespread
carcinogen. The problem is that the TV networks, which use the public airwaves
we have licensed to them, are our key means of public education in America.
And they are stonewalling.
In the days after the Jonesboro shootings, I was interviewed on Canadian national
TV, the British Broadcasting Company, and many U.S. and international radio
shows and newspapers. But the American television networks simply would not
touch this aspect of the story. Never in my experience as a historian and a
psychologist have I seen any institution in America so clearly responsible for
so very many deaths, and so clearly abusing their publicly licensed authority
and power to cover up their guilt.
Time after time, idealistic young network producers contacted me from one of
the networks, fascinated by the irony that an expert in the field of violence
and aggression was living in Jonesboro and was at the school almost from the
beginning. But unlike all the other media, these network news stories always
died a sudden, silent death when the network's powers-that-be said, "Yeah,
we need this story like we need a hole in the head."
Many times since the shooting I have been asked, "Why weren't you on TV
talking about the stuff in your book?" And every time my answer had to
be, "The TV networks are burying this story. They know they are guilty,
and they want to delay the retribution as long as they can."
As an author and expert on killing, I believe I have spoken on the subject
at every Rotary, Kiwanis, and Lions Club in a 50-mile radius of Jonesboro. So
when the plague of satellite dishes descended upon us like huge locusts, many
people here were aware of the scientific data linking TV violence and violent
crime.
The networks will stick their lenses anywhere and courageously expose anything.
Like flies on open wounds, they find nothing too private or shameful for their
probing lenses--except themselves, and their share of guilt in the terrible,
tragic crime that happened here.
A CBS executive told me his plan. He knows all about the link between media
and violence. His own in-house people have advised him to protect his child
from the poison his industry is bringing to America's children. He is not going
to expose his child to TV until she's old enough to learn how to read. And then
he will select very carefully what she sees. He and his wife plan to send her
to a daycare center that has no television, and he plans to show her only age-appropriate
videos.
That should be the bare minimum with children: Show them only age-appropriate
videos, and think hard about what is age appropriate.
The most benign product you are going to get from the networks are 22-minute
sitcoms or cartoons providing instant solutions for all of life's problems,
interlaced with commercials telling you what a slug you are if you don't ingest
the right sugary substances and don't wear the right shoes.
The worst product your child is going to get from the networks is represented
by one TV commentator who told me, "Well, we only have one really violent
show on our network, and that is NYPD Blue. I'll admit that that is bad, but
it is only one night a week."
I wondered at the time how she would feel if someone said, "Well, I only
beat my wife in front of the kids one night a week." The effect is the
same.
"You're not supposed to know who I am!" said NYPD Blue star Kim Delaney,
in response to young children who recognized her from her role on that show.
According to USA Weekend, she was shocked that underage viewers watch her show,
which is rated TV-14 for gruesome crimes, raw language, and explicit sex scenes.
But they do watch, don't they?
Education about media and violence does make a difference. I was on a radio
call-in show in San Antonio, Texas. A woman called and said, "I would never
have had the courage to do this two years ago. But let me tell you what happened.
You tell me if I was right.
"My 13-year-old boy spent the night with a neighbor boy. After that night,
he started having nightmares. I got him to admit what the nightmares were about.
While he was at the neighbor's house, they watched splatter movies all night:
people cutting people up with chain saws and stuff like that."
"I called the neighbors and told them, 'Listen: you are sick people. I
wouldn't feel any different about you if you had given my son pornography or
alcohol. And I'm not going to have anything further to do with you or your son--and
neither is anybody else in this neighborhood, if I have anything to do with
it--until you stop what you're doing.' "
That's powerful. That's censure, not censorship. We ought to have the moral
courage to censure people who think that violence is legitimate entertainment.
One of the most effective ways for Christians to be salt and light is by simply
confronting the culture of violence as entertainment. A friend of mine, a retired
army officer who teaches at a nearby middle school, uses the movie Gettysburg
to teach his students about the Civil War. A scene in that movie very dramatically
depicts the tragedy of Pickett's Charge. As the Confederate troops charge into
the Union lines, the cannons fire into their masses at point-blank range, and
there is nothing but a red mist that comes up from the smoke and flames. He
told me that when he first showed this heart-wrenching, tragic scene to his
students, they laughed.
He began to confront this behavior ahead of time by saying: "In the past,
students have laughed at this scene, and I want to tell you that this is completely
unacceptable behavior. This movie depicts a tragedy in American history, a tragedy
that happened to our ancestors, and I will not tolerate any laughing."
From then on, when he played that scene to his students, over the years, he
says there was no laughter. Instead, many of them wept.
What the media teach is unnatural, and if confronted in love and assurance,
the house they have built on the sand will crumble. But our house is built on
the rock. If we don't actively present our values, then the media will most
assuredly inflict theirs on our children, and the children, like those in that
class watching Gettysburg, simply won't know any better.
There are many other things that the Christian community can do to help change
our culture. Youth activities can provide alternatives to television, and churches
can lead the way in providing alternative locations for latchkey children. Fellowship
groups can provide guidance and support to young parents as they strive to raise
their children without the destructive influences of the media. Mentoring programs
can pair mature, educated adults with young parents to help them through the
preschool ages without using the TV as a babysitter. And most of all, the churches
can provide the clarion call of decency and love and peace as an alternative
to death and destruction--not just for the sake of the church, but for the transformation
of our culture.
|