Shame on you! We don’t hear that much anymore. When did we lose our ability to be ashamed of ourselves? Shame has a vital place in our society and we seem to have lost our sensitivity to it. Shame keeps us in check; it causes feelings so uncomfortable that we avoid in the future whatever despicable behavior caused it to darken our door in the first place. Horrible actions – criminal, immoral, and inhumane – should be punished, not only by the institutions in place to formally handle them, but by our personal sense of right and wrong. We SHOULD hold bad behavior in contempt. We SHOULD know where the line lies between right and wrong and feel rotten when we cross it.
What, exactly, is the problem with telling children that there are consequences for misbehavior and that they will pay them if they act up? We are far too willing to invest an incredible amount of effort in finding excuses for bad behavior. Instead of imposing consequences for mouthing off to a teacher, for example, parents try blaming the teacher, the schools, or a raging case of ODD (oppositional-defiant disorder) for their child’s outburst. What lesson does that teach the child? Instead of a heartfelt apology for a rude encounter with a co-worker, each of us has a far greater tendency than we would have thirty years ago to try to transfer blame to the victim. “Yeah, I don’t like the way Joe (parks, walks, looks, etc…) ‘Bout time he got a piece of my mind.” The underlying problem with all of this is that, once the poor behavior has occurred, it’s forgotten. We don’t carry the sense of shame that drives one (as my parents would have commanded) to “straighten up and fly right.”
It is difficult to talk of shame when reflecting on the birth of children. Under the best circumstances, the possibility of pregnancy should be deeply considered and the existence of the resulting child weighed against the mom's life without that child. Some women choose to have their kids, with or without an involved father, and carry on as any other mom might - working hard, setting examples of respect and propriety. But increasingly our society is accepting - without shame - single moms who are boastful about their fatherless children BECAUSE they are fatherless. The more the merrier – kids and partners. It’s not at all unusual to see women on national television bragging about their brood and their multiple “baby daddies.” I don’t get it. It's as if the children are the afterthought - the status as "single mom" with the emphasis on "single" not on "mom". Do they not realize the inherent message? These are the same women who buy paternity tests at CVS without even wearing a disguise. (That we have become such a shameless society that these are even available at CVS is an entirely different discussion…)
Another contributor to the problem of disappearing shame is our vocabulary. When our language creates slang to chat about crude or otherwise unacceptable behavior in public, we legitimize it. Fifty years ago, we tried to avoid saying the word “pregnant” aloud – even when the woman was married and she and her husband thrilled about the expected child. When a young woman found herself “in a family way” without a spouse, the terms "P.G.” or “in trouble” were whispered under our breaths. People today argue that that sort of repressive thinking about a perfectly natural event lent itself to misinformation and unnecessary embarrassment. In most cases, I agree! However, I don’t believe the opposite extreme is a better practice. Gossiping about being “knocked up” brings the most serious, personal experience a woman can go through to the level of a trip to an amusement park.
I don’t know what, for example, a young woman is advertising when she wears a pair of spandex shorts with “Juicy” written across her butt. If it’s the obvious implication, does she really hold herself in such low esteem? Under what possible circumstances would her parents look at her in that outfit and say, “Ah, there’s our daughter. We’re so proud! She’s juicy.”
Similarly, I don’t believe that casually referring to a woman as a bitch is acceptable either, and men exclaiming, “bros before hoes” diminishes everyone involved – their male friends, their female acquaintances, and themselves. This poor use of the English language is an insidious way to sneak degrading, hurtful, unfair labels onto others. When we're embarrassed to sit beside our parents or grandparents while watching a movie or listening to a song, it should occur to us that the actors/directors/song writer/performer should be ashamed of their production. The very existence of such media has changed the way we look at life and at each other. It also allows a freer use of words that we should be ashamed of saying out loud.
And when did it become acceptable to appear, for lack of a more appropriate term, sleazy and not be ashamed? We applaud the half-naked celebrity, the dancers simulating sex, the speakers of lusty language and foul-mouthed dialogue. Genuine, authentic, and real seem to be the new "odd". We're supposed to work hard to be what we are not. Should people not be ashamed of investing so much of their time and energy becoming something they are not? People who pay for plastic surgery and shape-hugging designer-wear should be ashamed of the way they market themselves. They should be ashamed of the way they allow themselves to become the models to which our children aspire.
Young men, sagging their pants to nearly knee level and donning shirts that are large enough to smuggle automatic weapons, emulate thugs and convicts. When did those people become icons? When did their behavior earn them the gift of respect? When did we all lose the ability to recognize the ludicrousness of this? Instead of the families of felons hiding their heads in shame and quietly trying to live down the humiliation brought to them by their relative, they elbow their ways to the front of the group to try for more face time on the six o’clock news.
I don’t mean to imply that shame should be an excuse to slither away from the public eye after behaving badly. On the contrary! Shame should be the prod that inspires us to action. We should harness the awful feeling of embarrassment and take whatever steps we can to apologize, to repair the damage, to pay physical or emotional restitution. Shame brings with it notoriety on scales both large and small. By working to fix all of the broken trusts and extend sincere promises to change our ways, we heal ourselves and others to whom our shame has brought pain.
Without shame, harmful behavior creates holes in our characters. Without the salve of sincere apology and a dedicated change in action, those holes become chasms and sooner or later, the goodness in our characters disappear altogether and for that we should feel truly ashamed.
Monday, May 11, 2009
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Techno Cruelty
April 28, 2009
I began an online game of cards this afternoon. It is a game – Canasta – that I have grown up with and have enjoyed most of my life. It’s the kind of game that you play with an old friend over a glass of iced tea on a hot day in the summer, under a big shade tree or on a screened back porch. It’s a gentle, conversational game, the kind that allows time for laughing and gossip and memory building.
This game today, however, was rather different. After logging in and wishing my opponent “gl” for “good luck” and having nothing sent back in return, the cards magically appeared on our screens and the play began. After playing the first round in cyber-silence, I won handily. My opponent then began a barrage of insults and accusations that were not only rude but impossibly irrational. She (and I only say “she” because her avatar was a female; this person could have been male, female, or, quite possibly, based on her behavior, something alien) accused Yahoo, our game server, of cheating by putting too many wild cards in my hand. She ranted, throughout each hand and especially afterward, that the game was rigged, that I was, in some bizarre way, fixing the cards, that I should be grateful that I was being handed a win, and on and on.
At first, I laughed – or more appropriately, lol’d – as I thought, “She must be kidding.” But, no. She was serious. After the first five minutes or so, I became aware that my heart was beating faster and I was actually concentrating on this blather more than on my cards. I tried to reason with her: “Are you serous? Do you know that these are randomly computer-generated hands?” I tried to understand her motivation: “Why do you play this game if you’re going to become so upset?” I tried to figure out if there was some reaction she was trying to get from me: “What do other players say when you go on like this?” No response. Just continued anger, continued spite.
Even after she accumulated all four red threes, scoring 800 points in the process for the feat, she continued, after pausing for only a moment to say, “I guess Yahoo must have felt sorry for me.”
Hmm…
What bothered me most about this encounter was the anonymity of it. This person, hiding behind a cartoon image, felt free to say things that were aggressive enough, crazy enough, to affect me physically. Now, I’m not a 13-year-old girl being bullied by others on-line, nor am I a zealous sports fan raging back and forth with different-thinking bloggers. I’m just an average person who sat down for a pleasant distraction and ended up with palpitations and sweaty palms.
Is it because we feel free to vent and spew and churl insults and hate-speak to others when we can’t be blamed for this horrid behavior? Is it because we simply don’t have anywhere else to express our feelings appropriately? Is it because we have lost the ability to express ourselves in ways that are clear, precise, and assertive while remaining civil and considerate?
Some people have said that violent films and television shows influence children to become violent. I don’t believe that’s true. I believe they anesthetize us to some degree; violence doesn’t upset us the way it used to before these images were flashed in front of our eyes hundreds of times every week. I believe that they sometimes create heroes out of monsters while lessening our concern for the repercussions of violence – the survivors, the lost loved-ones, the years of healing. But I don’t believe they cause children to act out more violently. I do, however, believe that our cyber-world is causing more violence. It is one thing to watch someone else being violent – to shake our heads and cover our eyes or click our tongues at the mayhem; it is another thing altogether to hold the trigger of a gun in our own hands (even when it’s in the form of a remote control) and pull the trigger. It is not the same thing to watch an act of cruelty as it is to move a character across a screen, make him jump in a car, drive through a wall, then get out and kick a perfect stranger to death. We are controlling that action. We are making the decisions to be cruel.
iPod just pulled a disturbing application from it’s iPhone store this past week. It was called “Baby Shaker.” This application allowed a user to turn it on and see how long he or she could tolerate the sound of an infant crying before shaking his phone hard enough and long enough to kill the child. The initial image of a happy infant was replaced with a picture of a baby with two “X’s” over its eyes when the crying stopped. Someone, sitting in an office on a computer somewhere, thought this was a good idea. Someone thought this was funny. Someone at Apple thought it was a good enough idea to offer it for sale on their exclusive application site. Many “someones” bought it. Who do you suppose those people are?
The nature of beasts – man being one species – is to survive. As animals, we fight to provide food for ourselves and to be sure we have shelter so we don’t freeze in the cold. As clear thinking, “evolved” animals, we also protect the people we love and try to better ourselves and life in general for those we care about. As humans, shouldn’t we extend that concern to everyone until they’ve proven themselves unworthy of our kindness and compassion? I am not naïve enough to assert that we should treat everyone with care and generosity and unthinking warmth; there are people who act in evil ways and who intend to do harm to others. They, in my opinion, do not deserve the compassion of others. However, those people do not make up the majority of us.
We must take a step back from the mind-numbing white noise of television and film and video games and computer applications and all of the stimuli that attack us daily and impact us in ways that we do not consider. We need to think about what we’re being sold. We need to consider the implications of these intrusions.
Because we have become relatively highly technical does not mean that we are progressing. In many ways, we have taken a giant leap backward. Not only do we give little thought to how our neighbors are doing, most of us don’t even know who our neighbors are! Comment is often made about how kind and considerate people become in the face of a natural disaster. Why must we wait for one to practice those skills? Should it take a tornado to bring us out to our porches? Must those around us be suffering before we offer our hand?
An avatar is nothing more than a representation of the person who controls it. It contains the skills, the intelligence, the humanity, and the character of the person with the remote control or the joystick in his hand. Avatars were never intended to be things that we hide behind to behave in ways that would shame us in public. The next time you choose to act unlike your public self simply because you can “get away with it” by using the anonymity of technology, stop for a moment. Perhaps turning the power off until you remember who you are is a better idea.
I began an online game of cards this afternoon. It is a game – Canasta – that I have grown up with and have enjoyed most of my life. It’s the kind of game that you play with an old friend over a glass of iced tea on a hot day in the summer, under a big shade tree or on a screened back porch. It’s a gentle, conversational game, the kind that allows time for laughing and gossip and memory building.
This game today, however, was rather different. After logging in and wishing my opponent “gl” for “good luck” and having nothing sent back in return, the cards magically appeared on our screens and the play began. After playing the first round in cyber-silence, I won handily. My opponent then began a barrage of insults and accusations that were not only rude but impossibly irrational. She (and I only say “she” because her avatar was a female; this person could have been male, female, or, quite possibly, based on her behavior, something alien) accused Yahoo, our game server, of cheating by putting too many wild cards in my hand. She ranted, throughout each hand and especially afterward, that the game was rigged, that I was, in some bizarre way, fixing the cards, that I should be grateful that I was being handed a win, and on and on.
At first, I laughed – or more appropriately, lol’d – as I thought, “She must be kidding.” But, no. She was serious. After the first five minutes or so, I became aware that my heart was beating faster and I was actually concentrating on this blather more than on my cards. I tried to reason with her: “Are you serous? Do you know that these are randomly computer-generated hands?” I tried to understand her motivation: “Why do you play this game if you’re going to become so upset?” I tried to figure out if there was some reaction she was trying to get from me: “What do other players say when you go on like this?” No response. Just continued anger, continued spite.
Even after she accumulated all four red threes, scoring 800 points in the process for the feat, she continued, after pausing for only a moment to say, “I guess Yahoo must have felt sorry for me.”
Hmm…
What bothered me most about this encounter was the anonymity of it. This person, hiding behind a cartoon image, felt free to say things that were aggressive enough, crazy enough, to affect me physically. Now, I’m not a 13-year-old girl being bullied by others on-line, nor am I a zealous sports fan raging back and forth with different-thinking bloggers. I’m just an average person who sat down for a pleasant distraction and ended up with palpitations and sweaty palms.
Is it because we feel free to vent and spew and churl insults and hate-speak to others when we can’t be blamed for this horrid behavior? Is it because we simply don’t have anywhere else to express our feelings appropriately? Is it because we have lost the ability to express ourselves in ways that are clear, precise, and assertive while remaining civil and considerate?
Some people have said that violent films and television shows influence children to become violent. I don’t believe that’s true. I believe they anesthetize us to some degree; violence doesn’t upset us the way it used to before these images were flashed in front of our eyes hundreds of times every week. I believe that they sometimes create heroes out of monsters while lessening our concern for the repercussions of violence – the survivors, the lost loved-ones, the years of healing. But I don’t believe they cause children to act out more violently. I do, however, believe that our cyber-world is causing more violence. It is one thing to watch someone else being violent – to shake our heads and cover our eyes or click our tongues at the mayhem; it is another thing altogether to hold the trigger of a gun in our own hands (even when it’s in the form of a remote control) and pull the trigger. It is not the same thing to watch an act of cruelty as it is to move a character across a screen, make him jump in a car, drive through a wall, then get out and kick a perfect stranger to death. We are controlling that action. We are making the decisions to be cruel.
iPod just pulled a disturbing application from it’s iPhone store this past week. It was called “Baby Shaker.” This application allowed a user to turn it on and see how long he or she could tolerate the sound of an infant crying before shaking his phone hard enough and long enough to kill the child. The initial image of a happy infant was replaced with a picture of a baby with two “X’s” over its eyes when the crying stopped. Someone, sitting in an office on a computer somewhere, thought this was a good idea. Someone thought this was funny. Someone at Apple thought it was a good enough idea to offer it for sale on their exclusive application site. Many “someones” bought it. Who do you suppose those people are?
The nature of beasts – man being one species – is to survive. As animals, we fight to provide food for ourselves and to be sure we have shelter so we don’t freeze in the cold. As clear thinking, “evolved” animals, we also protect the people we love and try to better ourselves and life in general for those we care about. As humans, shouldn’t we extend that concern to everyone until they’ve proven themselves unworthy of our kindness and compassion? I am not naïve enough to assert that we should treat everyone with care and generosity and unthinking warmth; there are people who act in evil ways and who intend to do harm to others. They, in my opinion, do not deserve the compassion of others. However, those people do not make up the majority of us.
We must take a step back from the mind-numbing white noise of television and film and video games and computer applications and all of the stimuli that attack us daily and impact us in ways that we do not consider. We need to think about what we’re being sold. We need to consider the implications of these intrusions.
Because we have become relatively highly technical does not mean that we are progressing. In many ways, we have taken a giant leap backward. Not only do we give little thought to how our neighbors are doing, most of us don’t even know who our neighbors are! Comment is often made about how kind and considerate people become in the face of a natural disaster. Why must we wait for one to practice those skills? Should it take a tornado to bring us out to our porches? Must those around us be suffering before we offer our hand?
An avatar is nothing more than a representation of the person who controls it. It contains the skills, the intelligence, the humanity, and the character of the person with the remote control or the joystick in his hand. Avatars were never intended to be things that we hide behind to behave in ways that would shame us in public. The next time you choose to act unlike your public self simply because you can “get away with it” by using the anonymity of technology, stop for a moment. Perhaps turning the power off until you remember who you are is a better idea.
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