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Hello and Welcome Everyone,

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Today’s Word: Choices

I went to see a movie today, a feel-good movie with a happy ending. As always, before the main feature was shown, there were short teasers of upcoming movies. I’m certain that this is not always the case, but today every single one involved violence on a broad scale. Because of the recent shootings at Umpqua Community College, just a few miles up the road from where I live, the blatant glorifying of violence, hatred, rage and wholesale slaughter hit a very raw place in me and I literally closed my eyes rather than watch them.

No one seems to know how to cope with the incredible number of mass shootings in this country. Some even dismiss them as ‘stuff happens’. But I wondered as I sat there with my eyes closed if movies like this appear to give legitimacy to the tendency some have toward violence and why it is that so much of our so-called entertainment glorifies the violence in our world.

I understand that there is no single cause of campus and grade school and movie theater shootings but it certainly seems to me that these kinds of movies feed into the malcontent nature of those who plan and carry out these obscene acts. And I wondered if we are deliberately sabotaging ourselves by making these movies so profitable. I’m sure some would argue that no movie would cause someone to become a mass murderer; I wouldn’t even dispute the point. But surely this explicit display of in-humaneness feeds into the mindset of someone who already feels dismissed by society and wants to make them sit up and take notice, even at the cost of his own life.

 

So, we have a choice to continue to make these movies profitable by providing audiences for them and live with an increasingly violence prone society or to boycott them and help remove one source of justification for recurring violence. Something to think about. Violence and choices. .. .. ..

Ellie Pulikonda, Author/Writer