September 14th, 2007
Tonight, I’m sitting at my computer desk typing to the world. Really, though, my mind is elsewhere and therefore I am elsewhere. I just returned from watching the movie The Brave One starring Jodie Foster. Regardless of your feelings on the penal system or death penalty, you can’t leave that movie without an opinion—or at least I couldn’t. But opinions have never been my problem.
One thing stood out to me in this film, in addition to the horrific, but mostly necessary violence. Jodie Foster has her own show on the radio and at one point, her voice-over says, “You know, I used to wonder how people could live in fear. The woman afraid to walk home alone each night; the man who’s afraid he’ll get mugged…You realize, it’s people scared of people.” And it’s true. Most of the herd has lost its sense of compassion and empathy for those they can’t understand. And they can’t understand in these particular situations because they have never known fear, only the possibility of fear. Or in the words of Jodie’s character, “Fear had never touched me.” We talk about court cases like the Duke Lacrosse players and sexual assault and lose sight of the fact that for every one potentially “fake” accusation of sexual assault there are at least ten others that are real. We see cases like Andrea Yates drowning her five children (by the way, I think the newscasters said the whole process of drowning them—chasing after her children and dragging each one to the bathtub—took over an hour) and say she must be crazy, but we also refuse to even humor the thought that she might not be. She might just have decided to do it and did. Nothing condones evil (and insanity should not give you an easy out—it doesn’t for the truly insane); you have to be willing to accept the consequences of your actions (even if that means being placed in a mental institution for the rest of your days, which is probably very much like a prison sentence in many ways).
It’s a sad world when people have to be genuinely scared of those they pass in the street, when a construction worker or thug (just stereotypes, I know) catcalls a woman—we know she doesn’t have to be dressed at all provocative to garner attention these days—without stopping to think that that might hurt her, that she might be a survivor of rape or assault or just might hate being accosted by people who don’t have an inside voice, when we choose to judge an unknown person without knowing that he might be on the unraveled end of snapping and throwing himself into traffic or off a skyscraper. And you can try to blame it on television or pop culture (but that’s not the culprit) or lack of parental supervision (maybe it’s a little of this), but whoever’s to blame it’s more important at this point in our evolutionary development to defend. We all need to know the value of our own lives and STOP JUDGING. My life is worth me fighting for it. You know, there are still cases in this country—the country where the brave, just, and free are supposed to have the right to defend themselves against threats to their health and autonomy—where individuals are sentenced to amazing lengths of prison time because they defended their child from a person who breaks into their home, because they were cornered in a dark alley and fended off their attacker with occasionally deadly results, because we’ve become so PC in this country that to say that someone is actually to blame for a crime they commit is considered heresy. And they say there is a separation of church and state—Bah! We’ve suffered over the ten commandments or doctrines of personal faith and personal responsibility for the Supreme God PC in all his glory and horrifying consequences. There was even a movie review for this flick that consisted of nothing but one person’s religious rant where he/she said that any person that kills, rapes, molests, tortures, etc is not irrevocably responsible for their actions–all it takes is a good baptism to wash the sin out. It was all very bizarre to me.
A little morbid, a little intense. But please think about this before you make a decision that could catastrophically affect someone else’s existence. And if you’re a person of some faith that says you are responsible for every one of your actions (which is almost every major religion), then perhaps you’ll have to answer for the stunts that unknowingly lead to someone’s death or suffering. That sprinkle of water over your head when you were two weeks old, that pact you’ve made with your god, doesn’t whitewash what you’ve done—it makes you responsible for the things you’ve done.
This is why, to bring the topic much closer to the UR community, I think it is a great source of reassurance that the school supports programs like SART (the Sexual Assault Response Team, a group of students responsible for providing medical and personal support for victims of sexual assault), Student Voices against Violence, and the Safety Shuttle (transportation available after dark for the female population of UR).
Personal Responsibility and self-governing,
Jordan
Quote of the week:
“Wherever you are, you’re home.”
Photograph taken by Jordan Trippeer
