Demand a Plan

Demand a Plan!

An interesting article about violence from AlterNet can be found here.  A small excerpt is below:

In movies, of course, it is the bad guys who do the unprovoked killing. Any violence perpetrated by the protagonist, meaning by us at a fantasy level, is vengeance or justice. Most people are deeply ambivalent about violence. We are both attracted and repelled by it. We enjoy and fear it. It turns us on and it horrifies us. Consequently, to get the satisfaction of a good blockbuster we need those bad guys to instigate things. The violence we like best is righteous violence, and—in movies and stories--most violence is just that. It protects innocence and restores justice. It safeguards women and children and the homeland.

Ironically, those who most relish the fantasy power of righteous violence are those who in real life are most likely to perpetrate unrighteous violence. Masculinity, the substance of action films, is defined by the Oxford Online Dictionary thus: possession of the qualities traditionally associated with men: a need for men to prove their masculinity through domination over women. Hypermasculine men hit women more, and a woman being pregnant is no deterrent. In the real world, tough guys are good guys until suddenly, sometimes, they are not. In the real world, most murders are triggered by the same motives we find so satisfying on the screen: righteous anger, a sense of violated fairness or honor, the outrage of feeling wronged, the conviction that the one murdered was the bad guy. 

Snip

Alexander Solzhenitsyn posed the painful conundrum: “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"