Day 275: Desensitized

My classes are getting ready to start a non-fiction unit. We're going to read a memoir from a holocaust survivor, Night by Elie Wiesel. It is a pretty dark book, but sometimes I wonder if it affects me more than it does them. I have moments where I am just overwhelmed at what a blessed life I have and the horror of what those people experienced is horrifying. I have taught this book for a few years now, and really don't see that the kids grasp the terror of the Holocaust.

People were loaded like cattle onto freight trains, burned like firewood, gassed like roaches and the world looked away. I can't imagine the screams of terror and grief, the gigantic plumes of human ash billowing from the furnaces, the abject horror of it all. 11 MILLION people, mostly Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, and the handicapped were senselessly, needlessly murdered.

While 9/11 was intensely tragic, it was so much smaller than the holocaust and the response seemed very vocal. Obviously, I was not alive to experience how people responded or didn't to the Holocaust, so I have no comparison, but it seems like while we responded to 9/11 in a mostly appropriately saddened way, that the abundance of violence in the media has desensitized us to the sadness and horror we should feel over any violent crime or death.

I watch a lot of TV. I know this. I just can't stand to be bored. My mind has to be doing something all the time. I generally have the TV on, my phone nearby or in hand, and the computer on Facebook while playing with the baby and doing chores. Now that Lil Bit is getting a lil bit bigger, I have realized she is starting to respond to the television. Anytime she hears an Apple commercial with the jazzy piano, she freezes and stares transfixed by the TV. Realizing this has made me more aware of the language and violence in many shows. In fact, I was hard pressed to find a show I can watch with her in the room much longer.

Being more aware of the violence on TV and knowing how realistic video game violence is today makes me worry if our current generation sees so much violence that it just doesn't faze them. Yesterday, watching my DVRed prime time shows, I can't even count how many people were shot, dead, oozing, corpses, etc. I realized how blase I've become regarding TV show violence and how the death of someone on the news doesn't even make the news unless they were famous or died in an extremely grisly fashion.

I know the people in TV shows aren't really dead so it doesn't bother me, but the grisliness of the gore on shows like CSI or NCIS or Bones still bothers me. I kinda miss the A-Team where bullets flew everywhere and no one ever got shot, except when necessary so Murdock had to give BA a transfusion and they made all sorts of "crazy" jokes the rest of the episode. I am willing to use my imagination for the violence. But it doesn't seem like that is the trend.

While research debates whether watching media violence translates into actual violence, I can tell from my own experiences that I am less aware of violence than I was years ago. I worry that we're losing our empathy. Too much violence still happens in our world. I know our media has turned all too blind an eye to the genocide and violence in Africa. I don't know as much as I should about it. I just worry that growing up in a world surrounded by violence that our children are being robbed of innocence and the ability to empathize.

Millions are murdered, raped and tortured all over the world everyday. Are we any more conscious of it than of the Holocaust? Are we any more offended by it? Or are we just as callous or ignorant as the former generations were to the pleas during the 40's? Is the fact that violence is piped in to our homes make us less horrified by the real violence of the world.

I wish I had answers to these questions. I do know that the TV is going to be turned off a lot more in my house. I am going to work very hard to teach my students to be horrified and angry when they see violence and injustice and make sure my daughter grows up sheltered from it until she is ready to see the ugliness in the world and be part of the solution.