Sunday January 23, 2005
Random victims reveal amoral mindset
Earlier this week, a 57-year-old Kelowna man was murdered on the street in front of his house.
“Herbert Robert Scully… and a friend were walking home shortly after 9 p.m.. when three young men approached them and asked for a light,” said the report in the Kelowna Courier, the next morning. “According to neighbours, Scully gave them his lighter… When he asked for it back, he was attacked.”
The trio of young men stabbed Scully three times in the stomach and once in the chest.
Neighbours blame a crack house down the block for attracting unsavoury characters to the area.
But there was no crack house on the beach in Penticton, in August 2001. Three young men deliberately accosted 33-year-old Martin Cotey, who was sitting with his girlfriend. Troy Thomas Gold stabbed Cotey repeatedly with a 12-inch carving knife, perforating Cotey\’s colon and slicing his aorta. Then Gold left Cotey to bleed to death in the shallow water.
Prone to violence
Two murders hardly make a trend. But I find similarities in the two crimes disturbing, just the same.
Both involve three young men. Both involve a random victim.
Young men are, as everyone knows, more prone to violence than other age groups. With hormones rampaging through their systems, young men are more likely to get into fights, more likely to have serious car accidents, more likely to risk their lives in war and/or sports.
They also need company, to support their inclination to violence. So, like British soccer hooligans, they hang out together and egg each other on. They form gangs. They have turf wars.
But the random victim strikes me as a new twist in this generations-old pattern. In the past, it seems to me, young men focused their violence against specific targets. Against members of other gangs. Or against representatives of some despised social groups such as (pardon me if I use the terms of the time) niggers, jews, a-rabs, faggots, chinks, broads…
In theory, such prejudices are no longer tolerated – although I doubt that Aaron Webster\’s family would draw much comfort from that claim. Webster was the gay man beaten to death in Vancouver\’s Stanley Park by yet another trio of young men, in November 2001.
In fact, these prejudices persist. They\’re just not verbalized any more. So vandals deliberately firebombed Montreal\’s United Talmud Torah Jewish elementary school, last April. Others defaced mosques. And raped women… And no doubt felt that they were somehow imposing their own distorted version of natural justice on their victims.
Nature or nurture
But Scully and Cotey apparently had no connection with their attackers. They were not representatives of anything. They were simply victims of random violence.
I doubt if notions of right or wrong even entered the attackers\’ minds.
When I was young, I had a friend who often got into trouble for utterly self-centred behavior, occasionally including violence.
His parents asked me, one day, “Where did we go wrong?”
I couldn\’t answer. It\’s the old question of nature or nurture. Did they fail to raise him properly? Or was it something in my friend\’s genes?
Similarly, did these groups of young men attack their victims because they were genetically programmed towards violence? Or because they were influenced by some external example?
I lean towards the latter.
There\’s a difference between “immoral” and “amoral.” Immoral means rejecting an accepted moral code; amoral means not having any moral code. Parents, teachers, and other adults may well behave in immoral ways, sometimes. They may disregard accepted social standards. But they do have some kind of moral code, however warped.
But humans are no longer the only source of moral training.
The amoral babysitter
I suspect that if you traced the histories of the current perpetrators of random violence, you\’ll find they spent much of their lives with the TV set as babysitter.
They\’re products of the video revolution.
The video screen salivates over anonymous violence. Buildings, police stations, and cars explode in billowing flames… Killers mow down victims like pins in a bowling alley… Planes disintegrate in mid-air…
And nobody cares. Nobody grieves for nameless characters. They\’re just gone.
The television industry itself denies any responsibility for setting moral standards. It\’s up to the viewers to decide what they want to watch, the moguls say. If viewers don\’t want sex and violence, they can switch to the Discovery Channel.
But it\’s not that simple.
Granted, sex and violence did not begin with television, movies, and video games. I used to soak up an endless succession of murder mysteries. Other buried themselves in romance novels, steamy or otherwise.
But in books, sex and violence always had consequences. Only in today\’s visual media – TV, movies, and video games – do they have no repercussions. The victims vanish; the continuing characters return unaffected to do it all over again next week.
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If you want to order my books, you can call 1-800-663-2775 in Canada, 1-800-328-0200 in the U.S., or order them on-line at the Wood Lake Books website.
For a lighter look at ethics, faith, and life, I recommend Ralph Milton\’s weekly e-newsletter Rumors. You can subscribe to it at the Wood Lake Books home page in Ralph Milton\’s Site, or by sending a note directly to ralphmilton@woodlake.com.
It\’s also worth pursuing Richard Fairchild\’s United Online site. Another site worth visiting is David Keating\’s \”SeemslikeGod\” page.
The underlying message is that death and destruction is acceptable. All that matters is that our side triumphs.
And that message is preached, constantly. Yes, preached.
If any minister proclaimed, for just one hour a week, that it was socially acceptable to have casual sex, to drive dangerously, to smoke or do drugs, and to kill strangers, he\’d barely have time to sue for unjust dismissal.
If school teachers tried to propound similar doctrines in classrooms, they\’d be polishing their resumes the next day.
But that\’s exactly what TV asserts. Over and over. Every day, every week, we give the TV set a pulpit in our homes to propound its recurring theme.
I don\’t believe the attackers of Scully and Cotey deliberately flouted a moral code. Rather, they lacked any moral code at all.
If we\’re looking for a source for amoral behavior, we might look first at the medium that prides itself in not making moral judgements.
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Copyright © 2002 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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