Offense Taken

Image credit: Dmitry Mayatskyy

Our society has gotten to the point where people who get offended are looked down upon. Now, there are some cases in which offended people bug me. For instance, I have a hard time believing atheists are actually offended by the Pledge of Allegiance containing the phrase "under God," and I'm annoyed when people overreact to offensive things. Overall, though, I think that our society would be better if people were offended more. To clarify, I'm not saying that I want people to go around complaining constantly about all the offensive things to be found in our culture. In most cases, avoidance is the best and easiest solution. However, I really think that our society's values and morals are degrading, and it's definitely causing problems.

Take me, for example. I have seen way too much sex and violence in movies, TV shows, video games, the Internet, books, and the media in general. After experiencing all of that, I've become desensitized to sex and violence, and that bothers me. What's more, it's hard to convince myself to try to re-sensitize myself, if that's even possible, because I enjoy things that have sex and violence. For example, one of my favorite TV shows is The Office. The awkward humor in that show makes me laugh my head off, and between the character's interactions and the Jim and Pam love story, The Office means a lot to me. Those of you who have seen the show know that it has a lot of sexual humor. The sexual humor bothers me, but it doesn't bother me enough to get me to stop watching the show, and that's a problem.

One of the most popular movies from last year was The Hunger Games, based on the popular book. The Hunger Games takes place in a dystopian society in which every year, the population watches a reality TV show about teenagers fighting to the death in an arena. This movie was what really got me thinking about how desensitized I am and our society is in general. After the movie was over, I remember thinking that I hope that our culture never reaches the point where we watch kids kill each other for entertainment, and right after thinking that, I realized that's what I had just done. Ok, yeah, the actors weren't actually killing each other, it was all just special effects and movie magic, but if you've seen the movie, you know how real it looks.

To me, the most haunting part about The Hunger Games is how much its dystopian society is like our own. We're obsessed with how we look and reality TV. We watch violence (boxing, MMA, football, violent movies, etc.) for fun. True, we don't watch people actually kill each other, but it's not too far-fetched to think that we might do that in the future. After all, it's happened before. The Romans had gladiator fights, which really isn't too different from The Hunger Games. They were even so desensitized that they killed babies. Sound familiar?

Desensitization is something that scares me. It's a slippery slope. One day, something, such as sex and violence in movies or whatever, seems completely and obviously wrong, and then slowly, so slowly, as we expose ourselves to things that are just a little more edgy, a little more offensive, we question if something we used to think was obviously wrong actually is wrong after all. It's not that bad, is it? It could be so much worse. Before we know it, our values have completely changed.

Of course, I'm a total hypocrite writing about this because I'm offended less often than I'd like because of my level of desensitization. My main purpose for writing this isn't actually to tell everyone to be offended more. My real purpose is to get you, the reader, to think about your values and decide whether you're happy with them. Maybe you are, and that's great, but if you aren't, is there anything you can do about that?