Caught Off Guard

I live in one giant bubble, a safe place, where nothing can hurt me and I don’t live in fear. Ever living in Muskoka, or Utterson rather, has led me to feel almost invincible, like I can’t be touched. There is no threat of hurricanes or tornadoes there, no tidal waves or earth quakes. Neighborhood crime consists of vandalism and possible under age drinking, but there hasn’t been a murder or a mugging or even close to that in many years. I’m simply not exposed to the fear or pain that other people that have lived in different places, may have been subjected to.

When I watch films such as Zeitgeist, I am suddenly made aware of these peoples’ situations. I forget, because I do not suffer everyday, that others do suffer. The university I am attending is situated in an area that is renowned for being dangerous and still I do not feel like there are so many ‘dangers’ surrounding me. Of course here, I can’t go out at night by myself and I’m not sure that I wouldn’t go anywhere alone even during the day, but I don’t feel like I’m in danger here. I don’t see homeless people here, or starving children. I do when I go downtown, but because my trips there are limited, I’m still caught off guard when I see their untamed hair and dirty appearance.

I generally like to ignore what goes on outside my bubble, outside the safety dome that I live in. They don’t effect me and thinking about them makes me feel guilty about the luxurious (in comparison) life that I carry on. I am not from a well-off family and I am by no means privileged, but I live comfortably with a roof over my head when I’m at home and I sleep alone in a queen size bed in a room that is all my own. Therefore, I might think about the underprivileged when I feel jealous of my friends (in order to bring me back to reality), but besides that, it’s just easier for me to go about my day without thinking about the disturbing crises that others face.

So I was sitting in Mass Communications, watching Zeitgeist and fooling on my laptop, when I’m asked to close my screen down and give the film my full attention. Next on the screen are some ‘heart-shattering’ images of the pain and suffering that this world has faced. Images of the corpse of a starved-to-death jewish person being tossed into a pit of others like him (or her, who could tell?), float before me, along with a crying child and a woman gasping. I watched these without being able to look away, like looking at a car accident, you know? The worse they became, the sicker I felt. The jarring images actually caused what I (or my body) perceived as a physical response; my stomach felt like it was growing tighter and I felt nauseous. Maybe the physical aspect was all in my head, but my head told me I really didn’t like what I saw.

Looking around, I wondered if others felt the same way. Was I the only one in the class that couldn’t take seeing or even thinking about this appalling display? Surely I couldn’t be. I wondered if it were possible that there was someone in the room that was not bothered by these (what were to me) very disturbing images. Is it possible that our society (lets blame violent video games and movies) who is desensitized enough that they were not touched by this at all. I could imagine someone I know saying, “Yeah, it’s sad, but there’s nothing I can do about it, so why let it affect you?”

Besides blaming movies or video games, what about the news? How many times did they show the planes flying into the twin towers? How many times are we shown what is going on in the world? The fact that we are bombarded with frightening stories in the newspapers or on the news at night desensitizes us to the facts of reality, to the fact that people are murdered everyday. So we don’t think about it when we see someone else who’s lost their son. Sure it’s sad, but that happens everyday. We’ve grown into a culture that supports, “If it bleeds, it leads,” so why wouldn’t we become accustomed to the news that we create?