The unreality of death

Does our cultural avoidance of death contribute to rising violence?

We had our youngest cat, Clifford G. - better known around the house as “Snoot” - put down this last week.

Clifford getting into Daddy's liquor cabinet above the fridge.

Normally, in our family we don’t put our pets down - it feels too much like playing God. We keep them at home, comfortable and loved, until it is their natural time. But the two we did have put down were suffering awfully, and it seemed cruel to let them linger.

When we’ve had cats die at home, our children of varying ages were aware of what was happening, and could take part in providing them end of life comfort and care. And they helped plan a memorial service, with the older children helping dig a resting place in the back yard.

So there was a sense of the reality of death around those moments.

But when they’re put down, it happens in a sterile room at the veterinary clinic - out of sight of all except the adults.

In our human relationships, too, few people die at home any longer in the West: We shuffle them off to a hospital, nursing home or a hospice center.

And with our society’s urbanization over the past century and a half, children have even less exposure to the seasons of life. We eat meat we’ve bought from a store in pre-packaged shrink-wrapped plastic - not from an animal we’ve raised and then butchered, nor from a hunt.

We have in many ways divorced ourselves from the uncomfortable physical realities of death.

The growing atheism of the West is yet a further step of removal from death: All of the major religions have spent millennia trying to decipher why God would create us, only to have our mortal shells die.

But having that faith foundation provides a built-in accommodation for death, as well as a responsibility to not take what God has created.

Today, we rarely witness real death, rarely talk about it, and for many, try to avoid even thinking about it.

I wonder if, in so doing, we haven’t somehow inadvertently contributed to the rising tide of violence in our nation?

The majority of young people in this country have no real-world experience with death. To them, it’s something in a movie or video game - bad guy shows up, he gets killed, and the narrative moves on to the next scene with barely a ripple of emotion, outside a satisfied grin from the hero who did the killing.

Our popular media gives short shrift to the unbearable permanence of death - the holes it leaves in our lives formerly filled by loved ones.

And perhaps that, too, helps make violence - even deadly violence - seem less forbidden.

A friend lost his middle son, just 16 years old, to a stabbing after school earlier this month. The suspect, in custody thank God, is also a minor.

One family is torn asunder, never to be whole again.

Another family is left wondering where things went so wrong that a child they raised has violently, intentionally taken a life.

For the surviving siblings, as well as for the murder suspect, death’s cold permanence is now only far too real.

But this is far too costly a method of teaching the next generation the reality of death.

Somehow we have to get back to instilling in our young people a stronger respect for the value of life.

I do not believe that censoring video games, films or television programs is the answer - but perhaps supporting those creators who make such media that avoids gratuitous violence could help even the field.

Nor do I think this generation is any more violent than previous generations. The truth is that each of us is capable of violence. Of murder. The Old Testament starts off with a brother murdering his brother. The greatest king in Jewish history sent a loyal servant to die in war so he could take the man’s widow for himself. The Plymouth colony of the Mayflower, only five dozen bodies strong, had a murder within a few years of establishing itself here.

The ameliorating effects of what we call civilization are a thin veneer, indeed, barely covering or controlling our hereditary savagery.

A shared faith tradition helped control violence in previous generations, as did a public discourse that but rarely glorified civic violence.

In the absence of a common faith, and in the presence of an entertainment industry built around glorifying violence, perhaps bringing the inevitability of death back into our children’s lives is one way to imprint upon them the awful permanence of giving in to rage or anger for even just a split-moment.

Maybe a cultural emphasis on traits such as self-control, discipline, sacrifice - all currently out of vogue in our pop culture - could help repair some of the frayed threads of our communities.

Many thanks to those of you who have subscribed to Lost in Cyberspace. Seeing the number of readers increase week to week is tremendously rewarding. Much as musicians require listeners, actors an audience, and artists viewers, so writers need readers to make the process complete.

Last week, Lost in Cyberspace was recognized at the San Diego Press Club’s 49th Excellence in Journalism competition with a third place for Online and Daily Newspaper: Columns - Serious Subject.

I love entering journalism competitions, and love winning, but then almost never talk about it after - I believe in letting the award do the talking.

But as this Substack adventure is still young, and since much of the mainstream media keeps demanding that Substack begin censoring it’s writer-partners, I wanted to point out that the quality of what you are able to read on Substack compares favorably with what is in the legacy media in terms of writing quality. (In terms of ideas presented and discussed, I think Substack far outpaces the legacy media.) I’m not sure who the specific judges were for this competition, but they’re generally editors and reporters from another city - I’ve judged journalism contests from places like Pittsburgh and Atlanta in years past. And so it is my peers who read all the entries, and decide which ones are worthy of recognition.

If nobody was reading these posts, I doubt I’d keep at it - so thank you for taking the time to pop in week to week.

As I mentioned in one of the early columns here, writing is how I process life - think of Lost in Cyberspace as a sort of group therapy in reverse. ;-)

I have some ideas for additional features to add in the new year - podcasts, polls, maybe even contests. I am likely to start paid subscriptions for some of these, but the longterm plan is that the weekly posts will continue to be free - at least for existing subscribers.

“Enemy Coast Ahead” by Guy Gibson

I found this in the neighbor’s little free library they put up a few years ago, in a cheap Bantam paperback edition. Had never even heard of it before, but it was written by a British Bomber Command pilot during World War II. Reading the forward by Air Marshall Arthur Harris, we learn that the author did not survive the war - he was shot down and killed in action against the Germans shortly after finishing the manuscript of this book.

I’m only about a tenth of the way in - the Nazis have just invaded Norway, the U.S. is still on the sidelines, France still seemingly standing strong.

Gibson goes through the process of the young RAF reservists such as himself being called up to active duty after Poland was invaded, the year of intensive training that followed during the so-called “phony war,” and then the early missions. He writes of the shock of the first time fellow crews are shot down and don’t return, of realizing that the other fellow is truly trying to kill you and you’ve got to try to kill him first.

The author possessed a relaxed writing style, and was clearly a natural story teller.

The one surprise I’ve taken from this book so far is the number of non-Brits who had come to help defend Britain at the very beginning: Canadians, Aussies, Kiwis, South Africans, even some Americans.

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