Future Visions

Our society is sick.

The news lately seems to be flooded with accounts of bullying, rape, murder and suicide. There is the tragic story of Rehtaeh Parsons, a 17-year-old high school student from Halifax, Nova Scotia. According to news reports, this beautiful young girl was gang raped, ignored when she reported it to the authorities, and then brutally harassed and bullied after photos of her rape were circulated on the internet by the perpetrators. Even then, the boys were not held accountable, and the bullying continued after the girl moved until she finally hanged herself.

Rehtaeh’s case is almost identical to Audrie Pott, a 15-year-old girl in California who hanged herself when she was also gang-raped and then pictures posted online to humiliate her. These cases, of course, have come to light on the heels of the infamous Steubenville, Ohio rape case.

While teen suicide is not a new problem (I used to be a volunteer counselor for a teen suicide hotline) the advent of social media has taken teen pressure to a whole new level. Unfortunately, this new technology hasn’t come with social guidelines.

In itself, these stories are shocking and disturbing, and countless commentaries will certainly be written about them. What I find most troubling is how the communities these girls lived in responded when these pictures and acts were posted. The deeper question is how society responds, or fails to respond to these kinds of situations. Specifically, is there is a growing tolerance for socially harmful behavior that may stop just short of being legally prosecutable?

While the legal aspects of these cases are being pursued, what do these cases say about our society? I think the vast majority of people would agree that “wrong” behavior in our society is escalating out of control. The question being asked more and more is, what has happened to our sense of right and wrong?

I think it comes down to morals, which have been largely discarded in recent years. Morals are not religious values (though they can be espoused by a religion). Really, morals and ethics are those guidelines to “right” and “wrong” behavior. In a sense, moral values form the immune system of society, identifying problem behavior and quickly responding to it so as to minimize damage to the body of society. But when society stops caring about what happens to it’s body, is it any suprise that more and more people feel disconnected to that body? In the wake of the social revolutions of the past few decades, I believe our society has been left with a deep void of moral values.

So when I say that our society is sick, this is what I mean: that our society has the cultural version of AIDS.

While there is no easy definition of what makes for a healthy society, a body that attacks itself and does not protect itself from toxic contaminants is clearly not healthy. The most important first step in fighting off an illness is to recognize not only what is causing the sickness, but in this case why the body is not fighting it off. So one of the most important things that we as writers (to my writer friends) can do then is to try to boost that immune system, and hope the body starts taking better care of itself.

It’s beyond the scope of a blog post to provide the answers. But perhaps it can help clarify the problem.