Elephants or Escape from New York?

In elephant society the females and all offspring live together while male elephants are not allowed into the herd except during mating season.  The male elephants are so violent and aggressive that they are forced from the herds when they become adolescents as they are no longer capable of living in peace and harmony with the rest.  I don’t like to think about it very much, but I find myself reading news stories of murder and domestic violence every day now, with most of the violence being committed by men.  I have friends who are male that are as appalled as I am at the level of cruelty that is being visited upon the human race by a larger and larger proportion of men at a level that is staggering to comprehend now.  You can blame it on guns if you like, but guns are only a tool being used by a population that is terrified of not holding all of the cards in the game.  They are a convenient tool because it doesn’t require the user to do anything more than point and shoot like a camera. Physical contact with the chosen victim is not necessary and not wanted by someone who prefers to think of others as only here by some mistake of creation. The use of violence is an individual choice that is made by every man on earth to either live and work in harmony with all the other inhabitants of this planet or do his best to bully and punish anyone whom he disagrees with. This is not a culture that can sustain itself for very long with this type of mentality running rampant.

I do believe that the violence that men are using as a solution for all of their frustrations could be greatly influenced into another direction with the help of Hollywood and all of the media producers in film and television.  A steady diet of viewed violence and the depiction of men solving their problems and grievances with a gun or a fist has been a highly contributing factor to the situation that we now find ourselves in.  If they can push the mentality toward this, they are capable of pushing it the opposite direction.

I realize that the bottom line with all film and television producers is money.  Violent film and television is a proven cash cow and it would seem that it never occurs to anyone that they might already have enough money to manage their lifestyles if they were to set aside profits for a time to contribute something to the improvement  of their world.

Anger and frustration about the problems in the world are not unique reactions to the male gender. It is how they, specifically, are choosing to react to social and economic issues that are creating a climate where there can be no solutions to the problems. People are not being taught how they might address the imbalance in our world without lashing out at others, trash talking on the internet, bullying and killing.  They are not being taught because it does not support the competitive entitlement and superiority ideal that society tells males they should have.  It is the outcome of a society that allows and encourages some to accumulate more than they could ever need in a lifetime at the expense of those whom they deem to be of lesser intelligence or importance, but first, they must set up the hierarchy to determine who has the lesser intelligence and who is less important.  In this society, it is anyone who has a differing opinion.

In the 1978 film Superman:The Movie, a problem of extreme violence on the part of just three criminals forces the planet of Krypton to exile them completely from society into the Phantom Zone.  If only we had the technology and capability to remove those of this Earth who refuse, for whatever their perceived reasons may be, to allow us to live in a harmonious way.  The story of Superman is one that I intend to write about in a future post as there are many parallels and lessons that are relevant to the human existence in it.

The 1980 John Carpenter film, Escape from New York, depicted a society so violent and bent on promoting a world so extremely hostile to peaceful existence that all those who would not live in balance with society had to be exiled to a walled, city-wide prison facility on Manhattan Island, and left to manage in the world that they created themselves. Without some sort of campaign to address and redirect a population overrun with anti-social and borderline personalities who have made it impossible for us to do our jobs, or go shopping or even go to a movie theatre safely, we are living in a situation that cannot possibly be sustained for long.  It is no longer a problem of a “bad neighborhood” or a few thugs on the fringes of society.  We are not safe ANYWHERE, and to those who make the violent films that have inspired a generation of violent males, it should be painfully obvious even to you that if your films are encouraging our current state of a murder every day by a disgruntled male, you will not be able to maintain your source of revenue much longer if no one can go to the movie theatre to see your films without fear of being assassinated.

The illusions of a society that can continue to sustain a false belief that some of us are superior and entitled to more than any other inhabitant because of our gender, color, geographical location, financial fortune, physical strength, or an ego the size of Chicago is becoming the death of us all when we cannot predict with any accuracy who will be the next person to see a perceived wrong or injustice and take it upon themselves to rid the planet of those whom they deem at fault, because of an inflated sense of self and entitlement.  We don’t have a Superman from another world who has the knowledge of a more advanced civilization to guide him through the true wrongs in the world and use his superior ability to make things right.  Because of this, we are at the mercy of our own ability to discover the trueness of what we were given on a soul level at birth, and gauge by the experiences that we were sent here to have, what we, as individuals can contribute to the world we were sent here to shepherd over.  I fear that precious few of us will set aside our egos and money making and schmoozing long enough to discover, as Jonathan Kent told his son Clark – “You are here for a reason”.  That reason is not to corrupt and create a planet that will soon be unfit to live on.  Look around you, and watch the news today.  Is this truly what you want your life to be like?  Do you want to spend the rest of the time that you are allotted as a human being in anger and fear?  Without a serious wake-up call here, we cannot expect things to ever change except to become even worse. Some species and societies have said “enough is enough!” and taken steps to create a better balance.  They may not be ideal steps but when something has to be done we don’t always have the luxury of a comfortable solution.  Will we take a lesson from elephants and exile all of the males away from everyone except other males?  Will we advance in technology to an ability where we can send the problem offenders to a prison from which they cannot escape?  This was actually done in centuries past in a round-about-way.  Britain sent habitual criminals and undesirables to the continent of Australia and left them to make what they could out of a virtual wilderness and their own ability to create something from it.  People were also sent here to America as indentured slaves to be rid of their criminal behavior.  Short of doing something like that, our only option is to promote a better way of thinking about our world and each other, or we have no future except one where we destroy ourselves.  We are dependent upon each other to make the decision that we no longer want to live like this.