We know this is true, that people actually love to fight something because the genre of good and evil has been around a long time. The stories started out as legends of ‘great warriors’ fighting a great evil. There were wizards, white and black magicians and damsels terribly distressed by fearsome dragons. These became fairy tales and we read these to our children before they go to bed. Don’t forget pirates, those black-hearted cutthroat sailors of the bounding main who horrify us with their daring evil deeds. We make best selling movies about them and pay money to spend three hours watching people fight each other.
Little boys and girls read comic books where super heroes [Wonder Woman and Superman] fly through the air and save the world from domination by an evil villain. There were cowboys and Indians and of course the Indians were the bad guys, really scary ones too. Today’s violent video games are a billion dollar industry made financially successful by the demand for ever more, violent and complicated video games. These games are on millions of home computers. People come home at the end of the day and play these [often toxic] games for hours to ‘relax.’
Think about that: they relax by being violent. That is a chilling thought. It’s harmless they will tell you, but the game manufacturers need bad guys, so at times they are either Asian, Arab or Alien, but bad guys all the same. So, they go back to the office and work with all nationalities [hey, maybe some are alien as well . . .] and is it possible that a part of them is still fighting someone?
We go to the movies and watch spy movies, car chase, bad guy movies, ‘boy movies’ we call them where there is a protagonist to fight. Someone is a terminator and someone is an exterminator of evil. We pay billions of dollars a year to watch one person kill another on TV and at the movies. And we wonder why there is war?
Religions launch ‘holy wars’ against other religions and other peoples and they have done this through time. The Crusades, the Inquisition and Jihad are just a few of the long line of religious conflicts. Obviously each religion is on the correct side of God, otherwise, why would so many people be dying to convert other people into the conqueror’s way of thinking? Some religions condemn other religions as not pious enough and do spiritually violent things, like excommunication, banning someone or black balling them. You’re not one of us, so you must be a bad guy. You can be a very good guy or gal and still be condemned.
Very, very spiritual people watch these movies, play these games and read these stories of good and evil. They read them to their children as bedtime stories. Very spiritual people take their children to churches which teach separatism, fear of God and intolerance. We teach our young ones to fight from an early age. This isn’t good or bad. It is how life works.
We go to sports games and watch people literally fight it out on the field of play, whether it is wrestling, boxing [feels like old gladiators to some of us], football and soccer. We can feel the violence from these games. Isn’t this a type of sports war?
When the Cold War ended in 1989 and the Berlin Wall fell, authors, screenwriters, moviemakers, and military people no longer had the enemy they loved to hate. Who can we use now they wondered? The ‘peace dividend’ we thought we had was surely short lived. . . . . . to be continued in Part 3
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