Violent News

This evening, I happened to see the news. I don't often turn it on, as generally I prefer to seek out my daily dose of current events online, from choice sources, or barring that, listen to NPR in the car. But tonight I saw a clip, and although I was able to turn it off fairly quickly (thanks to the excuse provided by my tv diet), I was pretty shocked to see that the first three stories all involved extreme violence and death in the Chicago area.

Now, I am not naive. I realize this is, unfortunately, a fairly common place thing here in Chicago, and other cities worldwide. But what was difficult was that all three stories involved teens and children as the seemingly innocent victims (I say seemingly ONLY because there was little report into what happened previous to the stabbings, shootings, beatings, etc. - with the exception of one boy who was beaten to death for sticking up for a friend, which, of course, is heartbreaking).

Coincidentally, what I had been watching previous to the news coming on (for my hour of tv today), was a NOVA special called Ape Genius, which more or less detailed the few differences and MANY similarities that the ape brain has to the human brain in terms of social interaction. The characteristic that most resonates with today's news is the keen knack both apes and humans have for copying and mimicking actions that they watch. This, in humans, is a part of learning, which in our case is paired with teaching/a yearning to teach. Apes, on the other hand, learn entirely from this. They are not taught by other apes, in a proactive manner, instead, they simply learn by mimicking. Mindlessly doing what they see to reach said outcome. They do not expect to gain any further insight by repeating the steps of those they follow. Apparently, we do.

I'm not sure what exactly we are expecting to teach our children by beating others for honor and kindness, or stabbing strangers for minor offenses in the street, but we show them these things daily. Now they repeat them amongst themselves - sometimes living to continue the cycle, sometimes dying along the way. It seems perhaps we should consider what we are trying to enforce upon them from this repetition before we further it.

Ironically, another characteristic that sets apes apart from humans is their emotions. They are impulsive, often easily provoked, and in many cases, prone to violence. Researchers believe that this has prevented them from developing fully logical minds. This is not to say that they do not have logical minds, because, in fact, they do. The difference is their apparent lack of ability to use them to cooperate in the way that we do. It appears we have grown able to separate emotion and logic enough that we can function cooperatively in social situations in ways that they simply cannot.

Yes, certainly we are right in thinking so highly of our emotional control; We never act out in very violent, entirely impulsive ways.

I just wanted to draw a few lines here...give us all something to mentally munch on for a few moments. Feel free to gather from this what you will, then set the rest back down and read a book before bed to forget about it.

Ciao.


P.s. If you are at all interested in this intriguing special on apes, you can find more information here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/nature/ape-genius.html)