Violence-Free

I challenge my friends and readers to try to have a violence free weekend. By that I mean to try to avoid all images and stories that involve violence. I define violence as hearing or listening to any media ( including rap music ) that reports about or attempts to entertain us with real or fictional stories of assault, rape, war, and murder.  I also define violence as perpetrated by yelling and shouting demeaning epithets at one another. It includes not only the treatment of people but animals too.

I tried to count how many television shows are based on violence even if they show no blood, there were too many to count.

In an effort to live a violent free weekend, one first realizes how nearly impossible this is. We are bombarded with violence in all of our media. It is ubiquitous. Televisions are now in our health clubs and restaurants so while we are working out or eating a meal we don't have to miss seeing bombs exploding and body parts flying. We even entertain ourselves with murder mysteries, how fun to spend our time discovering clues to the identiy of a murderer?

We are consumers of violence. Hollywood gets richer from the way we love to munch on popcorn while watching blood and guts on the big screen. We talk about wanting to live in peace but we are culturally addicted to the adrenalin rush we get from watching car chases and hit men getting their mark.

We become desensitized to violence and justify its existence because it tells a good or even true story about the way we live.

If we want to live in a better world, if we want to have more dreams fufilled and less nightmares realized, we must begin to detach ourselves from our violence saturated lives.