So many obviously staged “good deed videos” appear on Facebook that I usually bypass them. Still, every now and then a new one comes along that is not as blatantly manufactured to gather “clicks.” After my eyes water and my heart sings, I think about what I have seen and I conclude, rightfully, that the video is bogus. I shake my head at my gullibility for being misled into buying into the legitimacy of another video created to make money. Yet I would rather be happily misled by a bogus “good deed video” than so skeptical that I miss an opportunity to view a real one. Yesterday, I watched a short video of two people freeing a fawn that was caught in a barbed-wire fence. A day or so before that, I saw one in which a young woman stopped her car on a highway and coaxed a little turtle across the road.
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When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.
~ George Eliot ~
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I wrote about my fascination with flames a few days ago. I wrote, too, that I acknowledge the potential horrors they can bring. My curiosity about and deep appreciation of the beauty of fire…the colors, the heat, the shapes of tongues of fire twisting as they rise…rarely are fulfilled. Finding an appropriate and safe place to light and watch (and control) a fire is not easy, nor is it something I try to do often. I am satisfied, though, watching a fireplace or grill or building a campfire, but neither are as powerfully mesmerizing as a big bonfire. As I look around my desk and the perimeter of my study, I see plenty of unnecessary paper that could be used to ignite a bonfire. In fact, the paper would not be needed to start a mammoth conflagration; the paper, alone, could make a beautiful sight if lit in controlled surroundings. I wonder whether some arsonists are devolved, from people who simply enjoy watching fires burn, to people who enjoy setting fires and feeling some sense of power for the damage they cause? Arson is a serious deviant behavior that—despite my enjoyment of watching flames—seems far more common than I would think. Some bizarre relationship must exist in the arsonist’s brain that links fire and pleasure and, at the same time, severs the relationship between fire and fear of causing damage, pain, and/or death. Thinking about “good deed videos” leads me to also think about the horrors of deliberately set forest fires that kill people and animals and destroy property. I might try to have compassion for the arsonist who set that fire, but I am afraid I would fail.
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The number of socially unacceptable behaviors described by words/terms in American English must be enormous. Perhaps there are computer-based linguistic applications that would identify and count them—machine intervention to handle the process probably is necessary. A few of the problem behaviors, which have varying degrees of severity include:
- Sexual harassment
- Murder
- Sexual assault
- Rape
- Bullying
- Name-calling
- Arson
- Lying
- Physical assault
- etc., etc., etc., etc.
A flash thought, quickly corrected by even brief consideration, might cause a person to think about the “opposite” of each bad behavior. But what is the opposite of sexual harassment…it’s absence? And murder? Again, the opposite? What about lying? Truth-telling seems to carry more gravitas on the positive side than simply lying does on the negative, which can range from telling innocuous fibs to more powerful prevarication. Most of the bad behaviors do not have obviously “correct” antonyms. Murder, for example, and rape… the obvious terms,” not-murder” and “not rape,” would be considered absurd. And, of course, the word “murder” has multiple meanings and connotations.
So many negative behaviors exist, but somehow the majority of people seem to grasp and adhere to rules against those behaviors. Not only do we know and follow the rules, we know the relative severity of bad behaviors—murder is worse than name-calling, for example. The ways we learn to understand and abide by social expectations include teaching, modeling, negative-modeling, and probably at least a dozen (or a hundred) other ways. Why, when the majority of society is overwhelmingly on track with attitudes toward socially unacceptable behaviors, are we forced to continue to battle against those behaviors? Studies by sociologists and psychologists offer extensive ideas about how to overcome the problems, but neither punishment nor correction seems to do much good after a behavior has been ratified in some way…not getting caught, being applauded by one’s social peers/gang members, being feared by one’s victims and others who know them, etc.
The term “indoctrination” is associated with propagandizing and brainwashing. But that’s what leads to either good behavior (whatever that is) or socially unacceptable behaviors—isn’t it? I have been away from formal education in sociology and psychology for almost 50 years, but my interest in the subjects has remained fairly high. Not high enough, though, to have propelled me to keep up with research on the causes of and solutions to deviant (especially deviant and dangerous) behaviors. It’s a shame that my knowledge of the subjects is insufficient enable me to converse intelligently with experts in the fields, but my interest in the topics is not shared by many people, who share my limited education education in the subjects. That’s true of so many other matters; I am curious, but not adequately informed and not sufficiently curious to become better informed. I wish I had been equipped with a more acquisitive brain—or more energy to successfully pursue the acquisitions.
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The office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but feel truly.
~ Frederick William Robertson ~
