Gilbert Cranberg: WHITE COLLAR TERRORISTS

Another mass killing, this time in Kenya. Ho-hum, so what else is new? Massacres have become so routine that the dozen killings at the Washington Navy Yard scarcely stayed in the collective memory for more than a few days.

Why should it be otherwise when death by shooting is seemingly everywhere? Attend a movie and people are dispatched almost casually. You need not even venture from home; blood can be seen spilled from the comfort of one’s lounge chair without the nuisance of having to mop it up.

More stringent background checks and less lethal ammunition clips are among proposed remedies and are necessary. That doesn’t begin to deal with the underlying problem, though, which is the ubiquity of violence in the culture. Screenwriters and film makers need to be challenged about why they include scenes of mayhem in their work. Body counts need to be a part of every reviewer’s critique. Networks should voluntarily adopt codes of conduct that include quotas for scenes of violence. Oscars and Emmys should be awarded in part on the basis of avoidance of unnecessary bloodshed.

Violence is a learned behavior. As the song lyric from South Pacific warned, “You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late, before you are six or seven or eight, to hate all the people your relatives hate, you’ve got to be carefully taught.” Or not so carefully. Simply being raised in a typical household surrounds individuals with massive amounts of violence. By the time an average child finishes elementary school, he has witnessed 8,000 televised acts of violence. By age 18, the number zooms to 200,000.

Much of this is for no more worthy reason than to sell products or services. Commercialized killing accounts for much of the violence that saturates our culture. It is, almost literally, blood money.

Consumers can quit subsidizing it by refusing to patronize those who peddle murder. Shareholders in companies that profit from anti-social programming should tell CEOs to find another line of work.

The public is much too passive in the face of the murderous assaults that have become everyday events. It needs to confront the respectable white-collar terrorists in our midst who contribute to an atmosphere of violence that ought to be regarded as intolerable.