Real death comes from the "virtual" world.

(Baonghean) - Today, while sitting at a drinks stall in front of the office, I overheard a conversation between a veteran from nearby and the stall owner. The conversation began with the owner's comment:

"Why are there so many murders lately? And they're all major cases, killing multiple people at once. Human lives aren't like plants or animals, so how can they be so heartless as to commit such heinous acts? It sends shivers down my spine! I thought there must be some deep-seated, tragic reason behind it, something that would drive someone to murder. But it turns out the reasons are so…trivial: youthful romances, ordinary conflicts leading to fights… Is human life really that cheap? In wartime, innocent deaths are understandable. But here, people are using human lives to settle trivial matters. How incomprehensible!"

The veteran calmly analyzed the situation:

- I think that perhaps the murderers themselves, even at the moment they held the knife to the victim's neck, couldn't imagine how horrific what they were doing was. Why is that? It's because the awareness of a segment of the current generation is saturated with images and information about violence, to the point that they "normalize" to some extent things that should be unforgivable. Just think, movies full of gore and violence, video games where players role-play to shoot and kill each other – I believe these things have an invisible but extremely profound impact on people's perceptions. For young people, it's even easier to be influenced and "brainwashed," because they were born in peacetime and don't know the horror of death and bloodshed. I just imagine a young killer, holding a knife to the victim's throat and taking that life, imagining they're playing a game – it sends shivers down my spine…

I overheard the comments and couldn't help but shudder. But not because of the details of the recent sensational murder case, but because I thought about what the older generation had witnessed and experienced, and how they came to understand the meaning and price of human life. Not long before, I had been to Con Dao Island, visiting the prisons built by the French colonialists and the American imperialists. I thought I had heard and read enough to hate war, but only by witnessing its most brutal aspects firsthand did I realize: Understanding war means feeling fear for it, and from that fear comes hatred. How could those people survive eating rice mixed with flies, sleeping on cement floors covered in feces and urine, having lime powder sprinkled on them and dirty water poured over them… how could they? Even now, when all that remains is a distant past hidden behind the empty prison walls, the thought still sends shivers down one's spine: every grain of sand, every pebble underfoot, every molecule of air breathed, is steeped in the blood and tears of an indelible history.

So, could it be that people's character and morality are distorted and skewed to some extent because they live in a world lacking truth and try to fill the void with illusory feelings? But that is extremely dangerous, because when we repeat the same behavior in the real world, the consequences will no longer be a virtual scenario. In other words, many of the crimes and mistakes that people commit unnecessarily are ultimately due to a dangerous lack of understanding and awareness. The cure for this "living in a virtual world" is nothing other than educating present and future generations about what is most authentic: the past, history, and suffering.

Hai Trieu