Healing Our World: Weekly Comment

By Jackie Alan Giuliano, Ph.D.

Mickey Lied – Nature Films Depict Distorted View of Life

There is everywhere dew on the cobwebs,
little gossamer veils or scarfs as big as your hand,
dropped from the fairy shoulders that danced on the grass the past night
Nature doth thus kindly heal every wound.
-- Henry David Thoreau

As advocates for peace worldwide try to understand why if you have a reverence for all life you are considered either a minority, crazy, or unpatriotic, I cannot help but think about how modern society begins training us to accept violence in early childhood. How else can the existence of political leaders, military generals, industry presidents, and millions of everyday people be explained who claim that butchering women and children is a necessary consequence of liberation and that the destruction of the environment is an acceptable consequence of progress?

Training to accept violence as a way of life invaded our lives, and continues to invade our children’s lives, from many directions, but one of the most insidious places is one that most people wouldn’t even consider – films and television programs about nature.

Child watching television (Photo courtesy Smart Start)

For example, many folks have been brought up with the idea that thousands of lemmings will follow a leader off a cliff to their doom. People will even call someone a "lemming" who blindly follows orders.

You should be shocked to learn that this is absolutely untrue! The popular belief that lemmings do this came from Disney when, during the filming of the 1958 Disney nature documentary “White Wilderness,” the film crew intentionally made lemmings jump off a cliff and into the sea in order to document their supposedly suicidal behavior!

White Wilderness was filmed in Alberta, Canada, which is not a native habitat for lemmings. It also has no outlet to the sea. The Urban Legends Reference Pages website says, “Lemmings were imported for use in the film, purchased from Inuit children by the filmmakers. The Arctic rodents were placed on a snow covered turntable and filmed from various angles to produce a ‘migration’ sequence; afterwards, the helpless creatures were transported to a cliff overlooking a river and herded into the water. White Wilderness does not depict an actual lemming migration - at no time are more than a few dozen lemmings ever shown on the screen at once. The entire sequence was faked using a handful of lemmings deceptively photographed to create the illusion of a large herd of migrating creatures."

This kind of thing still goes on today, in much more subtle ways, in most nature films.

Violence against women, children, men, and nature abound in the media. But don’t we live in a violent society, and isn’t the media just reflecting that reality? Well, it turns out that the rate of violent crime has actually not gone up significantly and, in fact, has gone down in some parts of the country in recent years. Yet television news reporting of violent crime has risen 700 percent since 1993, creating a state of fear and panic in our children, and adults, that is unprecedented. This effect alone keeps us from socializing with others and keeps us in a constant state of fear.

The modeling we set up in the early years has a profound influence on what choices they make in our children’s future. And once they have seen someone being hacked up in a Movie of the Week, those images and their effect can never be removed.

Kids holding guns (Photo credit unknown)

By the time a typical TV viewing child has graduated high school, he or she will have seen over 360,000 advertisements, tens of thousands of violent acts including murder, and thousands of confusing and contradictory sexual messages. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) says that children who are developmentally under the age of eight are not able to understand the intent of advertisements and, in fact, accept advertising claims as true.

Look at the results: 31 percent of nine year old girls think they are too fat and 11 percent of eighth grade girls are on diets! TV has contributed in a major way to obesity and diabetes because it is the principle cause of inactivity in kids and adults.

The environment is depicted just as poorly in most media outlets.

The AAP recommends that, "Pediatricians should urge parents to avoid television viewing for children under the age of two years. Although certain television programs may be promoted to this age group, research on early brain development shows that babies and toddlers have a critical need for direct interactions with parents and other significant caregivers for healthy brain growth and the development of appropriate social, emotional, and cognitive skills."

For kids older than two, the AAP recommends no more than one to two hours a day of developmentally appropriate, nonviolent television programming.

So what are the effects of all this subtle and not-so-subtle indoctrination? I think it is related to how people with conservative social views can ignore the overwhelming evidence of the greed, corruption, and selfishness that comes from the likes of George W. Bush and his cronies.

I have only been able to conclude that it is because such folks:

1. see no problem with greed at any cost,
   
2. see the natural world only as a resource to be plundered,
   
3. have no clue about the idea of critical thinking and they do not question the myths, assumptions, and misconceptions they were brought up with by their well-meaning parents and the media,
   
4. do not challenge themselves to find truly progressive information sources and instead live off of feel-good, “all is well” conservative publications, or
   
5. are so disconnected from the natural world and web of life that they do not understand that a reverence for all life must take precedence over all other priorities.

Why do such conservatives, instead of embracing the concerns that we are harming ourselves, our children, and our planet's precious life support systems and cutting back on profit just a little bit, insist on picking apart the arguments, playing with language, and trying their best to rationalize their way out of the idea that we are causing harm that is long lasting and pervasive?

What would the harm be in regulating industry more, searching for less harmful chemicals, and finding other ways to oust a dictator than killing his citizens and teenage soldiers? I think it has something to do with how selfish we are taught to be as a culture. We are taught the opposite of reverence for life and interconnectedness. It seems that everyone must be allowed the opportunity to become rich, even if people have to die.

When it comes to toxic pollution, unfortunately, the resiliency of the human organism allows many people to suffer internally before anything manifests itself on the surface. And the way most modern Western cultures have taught us to "suffer through adversity" and to "buck up" and "tough it out," people are hesitant to point out how poorly they feel most of the time.

In Los Angeles March 30, thousands of anti-war activists demonstrated in Pershing Square. (Photo courtesy Indymedia)

It may be an uphill battle to answer these questions and correct the errors for many of us adults, but we had better make sure beyond a shadow of a doubt that we are not creating the same destructive, murderous mindsets in our children. My son is not going to grow up believing that in order for him to be free, it is OK to shoot innocent women and children, blow up babies, and destroy the environment.

We must allow our children the space in their minds and hearts to find a better way. And simple as it may sound, turning off the television is a good place to start.

And by the way, I must remind us all again that wanting peace is NOT unpatriotic. It may, in fact, be the ultimate patriotic act.

RESOURCES

1. See the complete story of Disney and the lemmings at the Urban Legends Reference Pages website: http://www.snopes.com/disney/films/lemmings.htm

2. Find out who your elected representatives are and contact them. Tell them George W. Bush and his oilmen must be stopped and we must begin waging peace now. You can find them at: http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/ziptoit.html

3. Keep track of worldwide anti-war protests at: http://www.protest.net/iraq_action_digest_dec_3.html

4. Visit Citizens Concerned for the People of Iraq at: http://www.scn.org/ccpi/

5. For some empowering evidence of the competence and values that even teens can have, check out the website for Youth for Environmental Sanity at: http://www.yesworld.org/

6. An excellent summary of the issues with TV can be found in the January/February 2003 issue of Mothering Magazine. A good summary article is here.

7. Check out the TV TURNOFF NETWORK at: http://www.tvturnoff.org/

8. Check out the results of a study on the effects of TV violence at: http://www.ncpa.org/pd/social/socialg.html

9. I have written an article that was published in "New Times" called "How to Create a Compassionate Child." You can check it out here.

{Jackie Alan Giuliano, Ph.D. is a writer and teacher in Seattle and the author of "Healing Our World." A Journey from the Darkness Into the Light," available at: http://www.xlibris.com/HealingOurWorld.html or your local bookstore. His new book of photographs and thoughts on interconnectedness, “Of This Earth, Reflections on Connections,” is now available. Learn about it at: http://ofthisearth.org. Please send your thoughts, comments, and visions to him at: jackie@healingourworld.com and visit his website at: http://www.healingourworld.com}