Real death comes from the "virtual" world
(Baonghean) - Today, sitting at the coffee shop in front of the office, I overheard a conversation between a veteran who lives nearby and the shop owner. The conversation started with the owner's comment:
- Why are there so many murders these days? And they are all big cases, killing many people at the same time. Human lives are not plants or animals, so why do people have the heart to do such immoral things? Thinking about it makes me shudder! I thought that the hidden reasons were deep and complicated, that only when the end comes can a person become a murderer. I didn't expect that the reasons were all... ridiculous: young love affairs, normal conflicts leading to fights,... Are human lives that cheap? During wartime, bombs and bullets fall and unjust deaths are one thing. But now, just because of unworthy problems, people are willing to use human lives to solve them. How incomprehensible!
The veteran calmly analyzed:
- I think, perhaps the murderers themselves, up to the moment they put a knife to the victim's neck, still could not imagine how terrible what they were doing was. Why is that? It is because the perception of a part of the current generation is saturated with images and information about violence, to the point that they "normalize" more or less things that should be intolerable. Think about it, movies full of bloody, violent scenes, video games where players take on roles to shoot and kill each other, I think those things have an invisible but extremely deep impact on people's perception. For young people, it is even easier to be influenced, to be "brainwashed", because they were born in peacetime, not knowing the horrors of death, of bloodshed. I keep thinking, when the young murderer held a knife to cut the victim's neck and took that life, he kept imagining that he was playing a game, and he shuddered...
I sat and listened to the comments, and couldn’t help but shiver. But not because of the details of the murder case that had recently stirred up public opinion, but because I thought about what the previous generation had witnessed and experienced, and then realized the meaning and price of human life. Not long before, I had just gone to Con Dao, visited the prison built by the French colonialists and the American imperialists. I thought I had heard and read enough to hate war, but only when I witnessed its most naked aspects did I realize that: Understanding war is when we are afraid of it, and then from fear comes hatred. How could those people survive eating rice mixed with flies, sleeping on cement floors covered in feces and urine, being sprinkled with lime powder and having dirty water poured on them,… how could that be possible? Even now, when all that remains is the past hidden behind the empty prison walls, it still makes people shudder with fear at the thought: every grain of sand, every pebble underfoot, every molecule of air we breathe, all are soaked in the blood and tears of an indelible history.
So is it possible that people's personality and morality are distorted and deviated to some extent because they live in a world lacking truth and try to fill the void with virtual feelings? But that is extremely dangerous, because when we repeat the same behavior in this real world, its consequences will no longer be a virtual scenario. In other words, many crimes and mistakes that people commit unnecessarily are ultimately due to a dangerous lack of knowledge and awareness. The remedy for this "virtual living" disease is nothing other than educating today's and tomorrow's generations about what is most real. The past. History. Pain.
Hai Trieu
