WILL TUTTLE, in his latest book The World Peace Diet (an outstanding read, I should add), recounts a particularly traumatic moment in his youth, while at summer camp.
Without much choice, he was exposed to the slaughter of a cow and the ritual killing left him traumatized.
However, a year later, when he returned to the camp and witnessed again an identical slaughter, Will wrote how the event didn’t affect him as much. He’d been numbed by the first experience.
Where is all this going? Well, it relates to television and advertising imagery that is around us all the time.
I travel the tube nearly every day into London and notice (as if I’d only just woken up to what’s around me) how posters for TV programmes, new movies and video games display images of violence, brutality and killing as though it’s all rather glamorous.
Yet while the vast majority of us want a free and safe society, why are we ‘entertained’ by violence at the cinemas and on the box?
Watching violence doesn’t automatically mean you will become violent. But I can’t see how, in any way, it can be good for our psyche, given the type of communities most of us would prefer.
For example, my cousin’s son, aged six (I think), ended up requiring counseling because he one day watched the news, the topic being terrorism. It scared the daylights out of him. As a more extreme example, a different cousin had a mental breakdown after going to war.
Many of us think we have no control – and we can’t do much about how films and TV programmes are promoted - but we all have a choice as to whether to watch them.
Zenchai seldom, if ever, watches television (because it’s not switched on) and, consequently, spends his time playing games and being highly creative. Interestingly, Eckhart Tolle, in his latest (and superb) book, A New Earth, says about watching TV that it "induces a trancelike passive state of heightened susceptibility, not unlike hypnosis. That is why it lends itself to manipulation of 'public opinion'." Tolle adds, "Excessive TV watching and, especially commercials, is largely responsible for attention defecit disorder. Frequent and prolonged TV watching not only makes you unconscious, it also induces passivity and drains you of energy."
I don't want that for my child any more than I want him growing up thinking violence is acceptable, because it’s not.
Photo compliments of Aaronyx.
