125-02-11-2009

You See What You’re Looking For
By. W. Owen Thornton

Lately I’ve experienced more people taking time to hold open doors for me.  I don’t just mean they are coming in or going out at the same time, but that they see me, and wait for a few seconds.  That’s a really nice feeling.  Door-holding is just the beginning step of human kindness, but … it is happening.  And then, on the road, I saw two large traffic cones in the middle of a lane on a busy four-lane street.  They clearly weren’t doing anything useful as there was no reason for them to be there and they were both tipped over.  I thought about going out there, but it looked dangerous in the traffic.  But then a Provincial Glass Truck pulled over to the side, put on his hazards and he retrieved them.  That was a much safer way of doing it!  Nice.

I think seeing these kinds of things and letting them register (rather than taking them for granted) is, at least, a little bit about being on the look-out for them.  So, if all you see is people treating each other badly, (which may be true) it may also be that that’s all you expect to see and therefore, what registers in your mind, is what you expect to discover.  I think we haven’t a clue about the psychological workings of the human mind in regards to these sorts of issues.  There are some things we know, but they aren’t wide spread or rather they aren’t common knowledge.

I refer here to how the brain works when you see another person smile.  When you see them smile, the same part of your brain that would create a smile also reacts in the same way, but to a lesser extent.  So if you see a lot of smiles, then you have smiled a lot in a given day.  And so, I wonder, perhaps not for the first time, here, about whether or not we should censor ourselves with far more care than we do.  I’m still thinking of the latest Batman: the one with Heath Ledger as the Joker.  This was a sick and twisted character if ever there was one.  So, when we witness the kind of violence that he committed, we too committed that kind of violence inside our own minds.

Does viewing/watching this kind of scene, then change us?  Does it make us more likely to do such things?  Because another part of our mind desires to do everything we see … only a secondary part of our mind prevents that (we know this because A: kids do copy because the filter part of the mind is not yet developed, and B: because adults with damage to the filter part of the brain DO copy what they see!) … then have we somehow been mentally harmed by seeing this sort of violence?  For my friend Mike at UWO, I actually did sit down to watch this movie on the cruise ship and I ejected myself early on due to the violence.  I just don’t want to watch that sort of thing.  I don’t want to be corrupted by it.  I don’t want my mind even once, reacting in such a way as to enable me to torture another human being.

We do know that things done repeatedly can become habits.  Viewing evil perpetrated on other human beings repeatedly … does that somehow give us permission to do it?  Perhaps we don’t because we still have law-abiding parts of us that won’t allow us to break the rules, but I will suggest that we become desensitized to violence.  That’s why things have become so much more graphic in our movies and television.  Gone are the days where you can see a big knife, see a woman scream and see slashing action and believe that Janet Leigh was murdered in the shower as it happened to her in Hitchcock’s Psycho.  Now we have to see the direction of the splatter before we’re convinced of the ‘reality’ of the situation.  Ugh!  Who really needs it?

In a university course recently we watched “A Clockwork Orange” by Stanley Kubrick – a movie that’s a cult classic.  In it is a rape scene.  Now I wasn’t there that night (I was cruising with my wife as the cruise was our 25th wedding anniversary present to one another), but I did read about that movie years ago.  So, had I been there, I’m not sure I would have sat through it.  If, as we have proven to be true, everything we witness, we ‘do’ in our minds only to a lesser extent, then I don’t want to witness such an act.  And for all of the young women in that class – 1 out of 7 of whom will be raped simply because they attend a university (this includes ‘date rape’) – I wouldn’t have wished for them to feel or experience what it is like to be raped.  Ugh!  Oh the inhumanity!  I shake my head at the mere thought of it.  There may have been some value in movies like these but I question the value in relation to the damage we do to ourselves.

Somehow, I think these visions we continue to witness over and over again … well it may not turn us into murderers or rapists, but somehow these images diminish us.  I don’t know if there’s a proven link between them and the lack of respect we now show one another, but maybe … maybe there is.  Reality television shows are all about the drama … about how one person hates another, and about how they’re going to stab someone else in the back to win.  We watch these shows and then we wonder why people feel free to say horrible things to us.  I don’t know.  Maybe I live in a bubble.  Or maybe I want to.  But somehow, I just don’t want to repeatedly experience bad things … just in case I start looking for them and for fear that I fail to look for good things.

Lastly, I will say that I have to work on my attitude when it comes to politicians.  I’ve lumped them all into a single group of power-hungry mad men and women.  To me, they only do that which keeps them in power, but they rarely do the right thing.  So when politicians live down to that standard, I discover it quite quickly.  But many good things are done.  We do live in a great country.  So … someone must be doing something well.  Why is it we don’t see those stories.  It cannot be because they never happen.  It may in part be that they go unreported.  It might be because some have proven to be power-hungry mad men and women.  But I’m also thinking they “all” appear that way because I find what I’m looking for.  So, maybe I have to release my sorry cynicism, and I have to start looking for the right kinds of things.

Cheers

Owen