The Other Inconvenient Truth

Below is the final draft of my class editorial. My intention with it is to ask the question where our violent habits, traditions and condoned public practices ulimately lead us, further away from God's Kingdom or closer to it?

Am I the only one to see it? This gaping window of opportunity situated in the brush and eucalyptus of the Hollywood Hills. Unprecedented globalization is the chance for Hollywood’s royalty to take a stand against human on human violence while proselytizing for the environment. The catch is I’m not talking about the violence we hear about in Iraq, Darfur or Burma, but in their blockbusters and bombs. This is not a call for censorship nor is it a hollow scolding but a real plea to each and every actor to take responsibility for and genuinely reflect on the messages they send out into the world through their work.

I admit, as a child I had a voracious appetite for cult horror flicks like Friday 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street. The bloodier they were the better. The more chopping of human parts the more thrilling it was for me. Then I grew up. As a young adult (and certainly now) each time I watched an ultra-violent or excessively psychologically traumatic film I felt sickened and sad and knew that it was changing a part of me. It is time Hollywood grows up too.
What got me thinking about this is all the big talk about the environment coming out of Hollywood. Not to mention all the talk about genocide, AIDS, Katrina, the Iraq war and animal rights. There is no question that the world (the industrial world predominately) watches Hollywood so buying the Toyota Prius, now as fashionable as a nymph-like Stella McCartney dress or Versace handbag, is a good start to helping spread the word about the importance of being green. However, there is one very large component an avid environmentalist like Leonardo DiCaprio is missing. He fails to see that the very work he produces in his movies, predominately with ultra-violent themes, (like The Departed or Romeo and Juliet) severely compromises his environmental efforts and sends contradictory messages to the public. By shooting another human in the head with potential (at best) pretend consequences of contrition, DiCaprio loses power and authority to share with us his passion for the environment. The nexus between environmentalism and nonviolence is the sanctity of human life and dignity.

As the saying goes we are what we eat. Bare with me. We are also parts of passages of books we’ve read, lines of poetry rest somewhere deep within us, art we have seen in museums or handed to us created by our children become a part of who we are. The same can be said for what we witness in our homes, on our streets and on the big screen, make believe or not. The more violence we consume the more violent and immune to it we become. We don’t need scientists to prove this, to chart it for us and quantify the results. There are some things we know to be true, whether or not we see them. That is called faith.

The way we treat one another is inextricably linked to how we view and treat the environment. The most elemental fact about our lives as humans is that we live in community within an astoundingly complex and interactive ecosystem. As one eco-theologist put it, “humans receive from this system, impact on it, dwell inside of it, depend upon it; we are not in any sense of the word apart from the natural order, but bound to it for our very survival.”
The same can be said for our human community. Dr. Susan Thistlethwaite, President of Chicago Theological Seminary, argues that we must acknowledge “the inseparable unity of the human community that either brings healthy humanity into being, or warps, distorts and ultimately destroys healthy human beings, their communities, and the planet.” We are bound to each other for our survival, thus we must view the handprint of the Divine in one another, as well as in creation, if we are to survive. As Christians we are commanded to love one another. If we are not deliberate in our loving one another our environment ultimately suffers, as can be evidenced in our poorest communities like New Orleans where environmental degradation threatens human existence. Human justice issues are involved in every aspect of environmental destruction. There is no way to separate the way we live and think from the health of the environment.

We, as humans, cannot expect to elevate our compassion for the environment until we practice and are committed in our actions, by choice of occupation and life-style, (on screen and off) to elevate our compassion for our fellow humans. It is a convoluted and erroneous notion that the more we display and showcase violence in film and television to “explain” or scrutinize it the more we’ll understand it and expose it. In reality, we only perpetuate the violence in our society and world and we move no further from it to get a better perspective. Instead we fall more in love with it and allow for it to take deeper root in our hearts. That is its power. Furthermore, any attempt by Hollywood to convey a message of morality laced in the bloodshed is trumped by the gore and the devaluing of human life.

This is not an argument positing moral absolutes. It is simply common sense. Perhaps it is the other inconvenient truth. That if we do not start speaking out against human violence in movies, on television, in video games, and in our homes, we will continue heading down the wrong path in regards to saving the environment. Hollywood is wasting its leverage with the part of the world that is paying attention by not having an equally aggressive stance against human violence in its movies as it does on violence against the environment.
Certainly we are all scared to make the radical re-ordering of our world views but our intellectual support for environmental causes is insufficient. We cannot save the planet without considering human relations, the impact on the most vulnerable, the global dynamics of poverty and underdevelopment, and neo-colonial exploitation of peoples and the earth. To succeed, we all must adopt a new set of values and standards that might be considered countercultural today but will be the norm tomorrow. Perhaps the stars can lead the way.

Where Does Our Violence Take Us?

I believe society must first determine if its endorsement of violence begets violence, and if violence undermines our commitment to the sanctity of life. To these questions, I answer, "Yes."

- Governor Jon S. Corzine, announcing the abolition of the death penalty in New Jersey. Corzine also stated, “Other good people will describe today’s actions in quite different terms — in terms of injustice — particularly those who carry heavy hearts, broken hearts from their tragic losses. This bill does not forgive or in any way condone the unfathomable acts carried out by the eight men now on New Jersey’s death row. They will spend the rest of their lives in jail.” (Source: The New York Times)

Despair Everywhere

My mother just shared with me that recently on a number of occasions she has found my father kneeling at his bedside in the middle of the night. She assumes he is praying but I have never even heard my father say the word "pray" or the word "God" for that matter. Only half jokingly he used to say to us "God doesn't bother me and I don't bother God". This was to relay a message to his four children that he was not in need of God to survive, to make it through the day or his life. Then he found himself later in life in an ugly lawsuit that aged him, that drained him and made him consider God. He began to attend church for a couple of years and I know that it gave him great comfort. His life brought him face to face with despair and he reached for God's hand.

I don't think this is uncommon. I think for many, if not most, of us we go along about our business too busy to consider God, our lives, our own despair until one day it comes knocking so hard on our door that we have to answer. I too am guilty of seeking God not in a moment of great joy or celebration but during a time when I doubted Love and any reason for being. I wanted order to the chaos I was spiritually experiencing. As I was not raised in a church I began my search for some moral absolutes by reading various religious texts. I know of, in some small sense, the despair that author Chris Hedges discusses in his chapter Culture of Despair, that leads people to Christian fundamentalism. The weight of our suffering and unanswered "Whys?" is too much to bear alone.

If our fear and isolation drive us toward God and perhaps even to religious utopianism there is danger, as Hedges points out, of abolition of critical thinking distinct of an open society. Totalitarianism rises from the mountains of despair experienced by the impoverished and disconnected. Fundamentalism often represents destruction of "the ability to think for oneself, to draw independent conclusions, to express dissent when judgment and common sense tell you something is wrong, to be self-critical, to challenge authority, to advocate for change and accept that there are other views, different ways of being, that are morally and socially acceptable." In our search for God and for finding comfort for our despair we must celebrate life and difference and not find strength in our fears or remain embedded in our suffering by building walls around our hearts and communities.
Amen.

Bringing Torture to Life

One of the questions posed during the YouTube/CNN Republican debates last week asked whether or not waterboarding is torture. Senator McCain definitively stated it is torture and the US should choose to take the "higher ground" and not participate in the practice of any form of torture. Romney, on the other hand, made the embarrassing remark that it was to the disadvantage of the US to even discuss interrogation techniques thereby sidestepping the question all together. I wonder how his prayers to his God can lead him to give such a non-committal and harmful statement. Harmful because in his non answer he more or less said to the world that this is not a moral issue, a human rights issue of value to be met head on. By not discussing it it does not exist. By not giving waterboarding shape or sound Romney fails to bring it to life and it remains a hypothetical method of interrogation and not a formalized technique currently used to deliberately induce human trauma.

If anyone questions whether or not waterboarding is torture then maybe we should look at it another way. I don't like to check the news on CNN but every now and then I do despite the sorrow it brings me. It seems that almost every time I do I find a story about a child who was beaten to death. Just the other day I read about a little girl whose head was repeatedly dunked in a bathroom tub for not saying "thank you". I would guess that most Americans would agree that deliberately submerging a child's head in a tub of water to elicit a particular response from her would be deemed torture and not just an unusually austere method of discipline. If it is considered a form of inhumane treatment (torture) for the toddler then it must certainly be deemed torture for any man or woman held in captivity. We should be horrified by the treatment of this child and equally as outraged for any human subjected to such intentional cruelty.