War has been glorified as honorable. Look at war movies from the last 10 years. They glorify the explosions and the gunfire. Men get shot and just spin through the air. Bearded, foreign-speaking people shoot up crowds, blow up malls, etc. We watch and cheer on the protagonists.
The American psyche hasn’t been tried by the endless streams of bodies coming from foreign shores since Vietnam. The American government has consistently tried to keep a tight lid on the violence perpetrated overseas. News is sterilized. Things like the Berg beheading or videos of women being stoned to death by Islamists are shuffled off to the deepest corners of the Internet. To the American people, war is what we see in the theaters.
Movies like Saving Private Ryan showed the absolute cost of war. Bodies were blowing up on Omaha beach. Men walked around without arms or tried to crawl from the tides without legs. The intestines of soldiers spilled from their bellies. When a soldier was killed, it wasn’t this dramatic spinning through the air BS. It was, like the book “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien, “Boom! Down.” No final dramatic gasping words. No tearful goodbyes. Just a bullet through the head or the heart and they collapsed like a sack of wet laundry.
I’m not going to be quick to blame Hollywood, but they share a portion of the burden for glorifying the violence. They share a portion of the depravity with movies like “Machete” or “Saw” or “Final Destination” probing the deepest depths of morbid curiosity. It used to be that the worst someone would see in their lives was the bloodstained asphalt near a fatal car crash while driving home from work or the mall. Now even the most depraved scenes can be found in movies and online.
We, as a culture, have strayed from God. We’ve strayed from our roots. We’ve strayed into acceptance of homosexuality, depraved indifference to violence, and replacement of God with big-G Government.
This incident in Aurora is not unique insomuch as it’s happened before and will happen again. There’s no way to stop every man or woman with a bloodlust from falling into depression or psychosis and deciding to shoot up a movie theater or a mall or a school. Sadly, I think it’s bound to happen more as time goes on, and not because of the availability of guns. This could’ve happened with a baseball bat, a nail gun, a chainsaw, a law mower, an automobile.
We need to correct the way we think and how we portray life around us. Violence shouldn’t be glorified, it should be shown for what it is: not spinning through the air but “boom, down.”
Reading “Thermopylae” right now. What a celebration of violence!
Wait, no - it was not. It was a celebration of civic virtue and those willing to give their last full measure to stand up to tyranny in order to preserve freedom.
War is rarely the answer - but when it is - it is the ONLY answer.
There is a reason why people for centuries have celebrated the 300 Spartans. I suggest you learn it.
Art imitates life.