Violence: The Smell of Subways and Sweat
When you’re a child, or at least when I was, words have very little meaning until you figure them out for yourself. I did not have a concept of violence as something that affected me directly; it was something my parents talked to each other about in concerned grown-up voices. Violence was something random, that was my immediate understanding. It was something that happened to other people, usually bad people. It was something that could not be explained or anticipated and it often involved guns. Most importantly, it was something foreign that we had to be protected against. It sounded unpleasant, if vaguely interesting, and it was obviously something children weren’t supposed to know about because they always changed the subject when they caught me listening.
In Dayton, Ohio, in the 1980’s, violence was a way of describing events that took place outside of the familiar context. My family lived in one of those neighborhoods people refer to while speaking longingly of traditional family values. Everyone knew everyone else; we played in each other’s sprinklers, borrowed countless cups of sugar, and held block parties every summer. Violence was a strictly external phenomenon; it had nothing to do with the crack heads on the corner, the rapist two doors down across the street, or the residual smell of fear in my parent’s house. We all went to school with bruises sometimes, that was normal. Violence is by definition pathological; therefore it did not describe us.
All through elementary school I got my ass kicked regularly on the playground. I can vividly remember the sudden nausea that accompanies a hard punch in the stomach, the breathlessness. That did not count as violence because there were perfectly normal reasons for it, a familiar context. Boys will be boys. You know how kids are.
School violence, or at least our awareness of it has increased geometrically over the last decade, and with that has come a drastic change in our cultural perspective. Currently schoolyard fights are viewed as pathological and considered grounds for expulsion, when I was little they were perfectly normal, and the worst consequence was being made to hold hands with the person you’d been fighting with. This is important because it demonstrates how subjective the process of labeling any particuliar event as violent can be. I have many memories that seem ordinary, if somewhat unpleasant, to me, but could be labeled as violent by other people.
My sister and I were not affected by the violence on demand phenomenon of pop culture because we were never exposed to it. We didn’t have cable, rarely saw movies, and the closest thing we had to video games was something that vaguely resembled Pong. My parents also monitored what we did see or read fairly closely. The closest thing I have to a memory of mass-media violence is watching cartoons in the half-asleep early morning time before school. I vividly remember my baby sister curled on the granola-textured couch, watching Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner blow each other up while my mom brushed her sleep-snarled hair.
I did come across violence in the printed media, from time to time. We went on one of many miserable family summer vacations to Washington DC when I was eight. All I can really remember is horrible sunburn and the smell of subways and sweat. I was always bored; my dad gave me his Time magazine to look at, and to keep me quiet. It was a special issue on gun violence, featuring page after page of thumbnail prints of people’s faces, long black-and-white rows of them. It looked a lot like a yearbook, but all of the people in it were dead. Underneath each person’s picture was their name, age, and a brief description of how they had died, or rather of the circumstances surrounding their death. The focus was on handguns, so it only featured people who’d been shot. This confirmed my early supposition that violence was something that always involved guns. I was fascinated by this magazine, but didn’t feel any connection to it. I could not emotionally grasp the relationship between those pages of grainy images and real people.
Reading that magazine was like seeing the Vietnam Memorial; I could run my fingers over the names, I knew that each name represented someone who used to be alive and was now dead, and I knew that this was important, but I didn’t understand just how. The people I knew did not fight in wars, or at least did not talk about it. Dayton was too small for gangs and most people couldn’t afford to buy a gun. There was nothing to suggest to me that violence wasn’t in some way restricted to distant, exotic locales like Manhattan or Vietnam.
All of this has left me with a very limited understanding of what violence is. Like the adults I used to eavesdrop on, I still tend to view violence as something that exists outside of normal, everyday life. I am much more quick to identify as violence crimes which I perceive to be unusual, like terrorism, rather than things which are also hurtful but, unfortunately, not uncommon, like domestic abuse. Certainly I have not been exposed to enough images of violence to have become desensitized to it, but as one of my peers pointed out, perhaps I gew up so sorrounded by violence that I never really noticed its presence. A sort of cultural inability to see the forrest for the trees. Although I understand now that violence is generally defined as anything that involves physically harming another person or piece of property, my personal definition is still somewhat confused. Even as an adult I am still searching for a way to understand how I am affected by the violence I encounter, and trying not to fall into the trap of defining violence as something that can only happen to other people.
In Dayton, Ohio, in the 1980’s, violence was a way of describing events that took place outside of the familiar context. My family lived in one of those neighborhoods people refer to while speaking longingly of traditional family values. Everyone knew everyone else; we played in each other’s sprinklers, borrowed countless cups of sugar, and held block parties every summer. Violence was a strictly external phenomenon; it had nothing to do with the crack heads on the corner, the rapist two doors down across the street, or the residual smell of fear in my parent’s house. We all went to school with bruises sometimes, that was normal. Violence is by definition pathological; therefore it did not describe us.
All through elementary school I got my ass kicked regularly on the playground. I can vividly remember the sudden nausea that accompanies a hard punch in the stomach, the breathlessness. That did not count as violence because there were perfectly normal reasons for it, a familiar context. Boys will be boys. You know how kids are.
School violence, or at least our awareness of it has increased geometrically over the last decade, and with that has come a drastic change in our cultural perspective. Currently schoolyard fights are viewed as pathological and considered grounds for expulsion, when I was little they were perfectly normal, and the worst consequence was being made to hold hands with the person you’d been fighting with. This is important because it demonstrates how subjective the process of labeling any particuliar event as violent can be. I have many memories that seem ordinary, if somewhat unpleasant, to me, but could be labeled as violent by other people.
My sister and I were not affected by the violence on demand phenomenon of pop culture because we were never exposed to it. We didn’t have cable, rarely saw movies, and the closest thing we had to video games was something that vaguely resembled Pong. My parents also monitored what we did see or read fairly closely. The closest thing I have to a memory of mass-media violence is watching cartoons in the half-asleep early morning time before school. I vividly remember my baby sister curled on the granola-textured couch, watching Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner blow each other up while my mom brushed her sleep-snarled hair.
I did come across violence in the printed media, from time to time. We went on one of many miserable family summer vacations to Washington DC when I was eight. All I can really remember is horrible sunburn and the smell of subways and sweat. I was always bored; my dad gave me his Time magazine to look at, and to keep me quiet. It was a special issue on gun violence, featuring page after page of thumbnail prints of people’s faces, long black-and-white rows of them. It looked a lot like a yearbook, but all of the people in it were dead. Underneath each person’s picture was their name, age, and a brief description of how they had died, or rather of the circumstances surrounding their death. The focus was on handguns, so it only featured people who’d been shot. This confirmed my early supposition that violence was something that always involved guns. I was fascinated by this magazine, but didn’t feel any connection to it. I could not emotionally grasp the relationship between those pages of grainy images and real people.
Reading that magazine was like seeing the Vietnam Memorial; I could run my fingers over the names, I knew that each name represented someone who used to be alive and was now dead, and I knew that this was important, but I didn’t understand just how. The people I knew did not fight in wars, or at least did not talk about it. Dayton was too small for gangs and most people couldn’t afford to buy a gun. There was nothing to suggest to me that violence wasn’t in some way restricted to distant, exotic locales like Manhattan or Vietnam.
All of this has left me with a very limited understanding of what violence is. Like the adults I used to eavesdrop on, I still tend to view violence as something that exists outside of normal, everyday life. I am much more quick to identify as violence crimes which I perceive to be unusual, like terrorism, rather than things which are also hurtful but, unfortunately, not uncommon, like domestic abuse. Certainly I have not been exposed to enough images of violence to have become desensitized to it, but as one of my peers pointed out, perhaps I gew up so sorrounded by violence that I never really noticed its presence. A sort of cultural inability to see the forrest for the trees. Although I understand now that violence is generally defined as anything that involves physically harming another person or piece of property, my personal definition is still somewhat confused. Even as an adult I am still searching for a way to understand how I am affected by the violence I encounter, and trying not to fall into the trap of defining violence as something that can only happen to other people.
posted by Octavia at 10:53 AM
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