I sat across from my father, an early Christmas stopover before heading West for work.
“This would never happen in Europe. What is wrong with this country?”
He was speaking of course, of the atrocious massacre at Sandy Hook last week. Its horror stunned the nation. My father, having been born and spent a large portion of his life in Europe, was a man who barely watched television. Never when we were growing up. He adored art and culture and would have no idea who the Kardashians are, were someone to mention their name(s.)
He was right: this would never happen in Europe. What is wrong with us?
To pin this barbarism on the sick mind of one individual, is to deny that we are all connected. In order to understand what happened here, we have to accept some responsibility that our culture fosters such evil; that said sickness is an expression of who we are, as much as the heroic gestures of the teachers who gave their lives to save students is a part of who we are.
One of our problems, our addictions, is media. Soulness nonsense of pointless or dramatized violence masked as entertainment, packaged, sold and force fed to us through even airport TV monitors and backseat taxi televisions. It nearly impossible to escape in America; you have to choose, to effort, to escape it.
We don’t even realize how brainwashed we are. People leave the TV running all the time, as background noise. I go out of my way to not eat at a bar or restaurant that has a TV in it. This is very easy to do in downtown Manhattan; it’s more difficult uptown. In the rest of the country? It’s near impossible. Why? Because having a huge flatscreen is something we are accustomed to seeing. We have no idea how to be quiet and sit with ourselves.
Perhaps you are familiar with the most popular Power Rangers, a show aimed at 9 year olds. Forget Sesame Street or Sponge Bob even for young children; what is considered appropriate is a line smeared by convenience, overlooked by overworked and over tired parents.
“The National Coalition on Television Violence (NCTV), which has analyzed the violence in TV programs since 1980, has stated that “The Power Rangers” is the most violent children’s program it has ever studied, averaging 211 violent acts per hour (Kiesewetter, 1993). The NCTV has also reported that most of the aggression in the show is severe, and the sort that would be classified as hostile rather than instrumental (e.g. Feshbach, 1970), that is, most of the violence in the show is intended to harm or kill another character.
Because the Power Rangers are the heroes and “good guys” of the program, their high prestige and status could increase children’s imitation of their behaviors.” -C.J. Boyatzis, G.M. Matillo, & K.M. Nesbitt, California State University
That study was in 1995. A generation ago. It has only gotten worse. That is one children’s show. Start analyzing video games, adult television and film and it’s only more disheartening.
We have become anesthetized to violence in this country.
This past week, what was also disturbing, as I was wading through scrolls of facebook commentary that day (outrage, sadness in the aftermath of the massacre,) were comments posted by those oblivious to the carnage. Even if one is against gun control, or feels entirely removed from the tragedy, we are lacking at the core a basic awareness of the appropriate reverence of these occurrences and their dark mark on the face of our nation. America mourns, and someone is posting with wild positivity on a seminar or drunken holiday party photos—it’s embarrassing that we don’t feel, if at not the very least a connection, at least a diplomatic understanding that others are suffering.
How about this ridiculousness: A serious of violent tweets berating Obama for cutting into football time with a memorial speech. I cannot bring myself to quote it: Click the link: it’s beyond embarrassing, it’s disgusting.
America, as a nation, lacks awareness. We have been dumbing ourselves down to a true experience of reality. We don’t even know what that means, it is time to WAKE UP.
When I returned from my first stint in India, which had stretched to 6 months in a pre-facebook age of certainly less technology than these days, I went to my gym at the time: a posh club in the West Village, and promptly cancelled my membership after one workout. The TVs, constant music blaring, ongoing cacophony of too loud sights and sounds, were too much for my nervous system at the time. It physically hurt to be there; it was an assault on my senses after a 6 month gentle silence of 3:30am rising. Half a year earlier, I would not have been able to recognize the effect on my physiology in the course of an average day.
Shortly after this time, I took a spiritual course where we were to go 12 weeks on a media fast. No TV, no papers, no online anything. News was garnered from what you heard from other people, or saw on the front page of the papers, walking down the street. I have a loud mouth and love to be debate; in a previous chapter of my life: obsessed and vociferous about politics. To be able to let that go and realize how unnecessary the media was in my life was absolutely freeing. How I was still able to learn about world events, and when I wanted to go deeper into a subject, I could choose to go find out more information about it.
I am not saying ALL media is evil, but there needs to be a conversation that limits should be drawn. I haven’t had TV for almost a decade, but I am just as addicted to Homeland as the rest of the country. A friend was shocked that I loved Skyfall, the latest Bond film. Of course I loved it—Sam Medes directed it, who is brilliant and soulful. It was exciting and tasteful. Our innate American problem is we always think more is better and that constant entertainment is as much an inalienable right as the right to bear arms.
This week is, albeit arguably, one of the most, if not the most, important in the history of humanity. December 21, 2012 is a shift from a thousands year cycle from the Kali (iron) Age to the Satya (golden) age. What does that mean?
It means we are about to understand that that still small voice is our inherent majesty. People are going to be able to hear that voice, have a connection to each other and the universe like never before, and we will slowly transition to an age where Sandy Hook could never happen.
It’s possible, but it will take time, and awareness.
You can’t hear the voice if there is something always on in the background.
We will only ever have peace in the world when we have peace in our individual hearts. The latter begets the former.
We must petition away, rise up, have a voice, and in equal, if not greater measure:
Turn it off, shush up for a minute, and go within. That’s where the power is to change the world.
Om shanti shanti shanti.
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