Desensitization

It amazes me how easily we become desensitized to things.

A few weeks ago Abby saw a little bit of that animated movie Chicken Little with some older kids. I think it was too scary for her – she had nightmares that night. Which is crazy to me, that Chicken Little is too much for her. In fact, even more innocuous things frighten her, like parts of The Wiggles and Elmo. Curious George she has to watch from the other room because of certain scary parts (e.g. baby chicks being stuck in the water). And Clifford is just straight up too scary. I love that. The purity of her response, being so untouched that her scare threshold is so low.

I remember distinct times in my life when I was shocked by violence. Once was around first grade. There was a revival at church (SN – I miss church revivals) and they herded the kids into the basement at Foxworthy Baptist Church and showed them movies. Two of them deeply scarred me by their violence: The Black Hole and Raiders of the Lost Ark. To this day, I remember the scenes that haunted me. In The Black Hole, it was a scene where a guy is thrown into some contraption that shreds him to death. It’s not shown on-screen, but it was gruesome enough to imagine. There were 2 scenes in Raiders of the Lost Ark, one a similar scene where the sword guy is shredded to death by an airplane propeller, and they show the splattering blood. The other was the end where the Nazis all melt after opening the Ark. Totally traumatizing. I had nightmares for weeks.

I was also shocked the first time I saw Robocop, I think in late elementary school. Way too violent for me. Too many scenes to mention, but especially the scene where the gang kills Peter Weller (and *especially* when they shoot off his hand) and the scene where the ED-209 kills the guy in the office. Again, traumatized. (SN. They later made a Robocop kids cartoon that aired in the Bay Area in a block along with Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends. That stunned me. If kids who ever watched the cartoon decided to watch the source movie, they’d need therapy for a long, long time.)

But that trauma only happens once, and the next time you see something as violent, it doesn’t affect you the same way. Eventually, you get desensitized to a whole lot. I recently watched Rambo (4 stars. A terrible movie with no redeeming value that I was highly entertained by), probably the most violent movie I’ve ever seen, and I repeatedly responded to the violence with laughter. To be fair, I think that’s the intended effect. The violence in the movie is absurdly – and I think intentionally – over the top. When people get shot, they don’t just fall down; body parts fly everywhere. People repeatedly get decapitated by bullets. It’s so ludicrous you can’t help but laugh. Assuming you’ve been desensitized like me.

The fact that I’m desensitized, not just to violence but a host of things, is something that makes me kind of sad. Not just kind of sad – really sad. So songs about losing innocence, or experiencing things for the first time really hit me. (Among them, Susan Ashton’s Innocence Lost, the Sheryl Crow version of The First Cut Is The Deepest, and Lifehouse’s First Time.) So much so that, from time to time, I intentionally try and experience things as if it’s the first time. Like, this is probably TMI, but sometimes when I kiss Jieun, I try to imagine that it’s my first kiss. She invariably thinks I’m bizarro, but it feels important to me, to not become so desensitized that you forget what an amazing experience it really is.

To be honest, I think becoming desensitized is one of the greatest dangers in life. I think there’s a reason why one of the most repeated commands in the Old Testament is to “remember.” It’s easy to forget, become desensitized, and become ungrateful. The Israelites started grumbling about the repetitiveness of manna because they forgot how miraculous it was and became desensitized to the miracle. The book of Judges is essentially, people forget and need help, God provides help, people are grateful, then forget, become desensitized to God’s blessings and need help again. Wash, rinse, repeat.

I’ve also identified in my own life that when I’ve stumbled, it’s frequently because I’ve forgotten how good I have it, become desensitized to the good things around me. That’s the worst part of desensitization: it makes you want more. And that’s the heart of addiction. Becoming more and more desensitized, and thus needing more and more to feed the desire. Addiction is the extreme, but all desensitization is like that. It makes you unsatisfied with what you have, and makes you want to seek something else.

And that sucks. If I reflect on it, I think it’s been the source of much of the unhappiness in my life. So yeah, I think I need occasions to just stop and meditate on what I have and be grateful. I love the idea of Thanksgiving for this reason, having an occasion to give thanks. Sadly, over the past few years, I seem to go to multiple Thanksgiving events annually and not spend any time actually giving thanks, which kind of makes me wonder what’s the point, especially since I increasingly dislike turkey. But still, the idea is good. Hopefully, when I see Abby get afraid of Clifford The Big Red Dog, it will cause me to remember my blessings, and try to experience them like I am for the first time.