Monsters on Parade

I used to wonder why he looked familiar
Then I realized it was a mirror
And now it is plain to see,
The whole time the monster was me
- Gnarls Barkley, "The Boogie Monster"

I know I said only yesterday that I wasn't going to worry about writing all that much, but alas, there are thoughts swirling in my brain that I feel need translating onto this page.

Yesterday marked the third anniversary of the bomb attacks on London's transit system. I did not catch any of the festivities, but I imagine they were laden with the same rhetoric we hear every September 11, that our suited superheroes will not rest until the world is safe from these "monsters". It was yesterday that I also overheard, from the room adjacent to mine, one of Toronto's more popular morning show hosts (featured on a "new rock" station that shall remain unnamed) trumpet his dismay over this rash of sex crimes and his desire to see these "monsters" receive capital punishment - at least that's how I interpreted the message from what little of it I perceived. It was also yesterday that one of the city's most popular daily newspapers (the one with the pretty pictures on the front that reads like a tabloid) announced the coming of a "monster" who is seeking to clear his name in the wake of a sex crime conviction.

As usual, I am puzzled by their concern over these "monsters" with little or no regard as to what lies at the root of the problem. Are they not interested in how these "monsters" came to be? Do they believe people are born "monsters", who serve no purpose other than to bring about our destruction? Is there a secret desire to distance themselves from these "monsters" by assigning them such a label? Do they fear what might be uncovered should they seek to address the problem at hand?

Perhaps, if they did decide to probe a little further, what they would find might scare them, for they would (hopefully) come to realize the eerie similarity between these "monsters" and themselves. Taking the last first, each day this newspaper, on its last page inside the cover, features a full-page spread of a scantilly clad woman in a provocative pose - its London equivalent goes a step further by revealing her nipples for all to see. On the radio show, not ten minutes before the host's diatribe against rapists, there was featured an advertisment for an "energy drink" in which a "very sexy Heidi" asks her stalwart male counterpart if he would like to try her cans, to which he responds by saying "I'll take two", followed by cheers from his posse of wing-men. And the individuals who claim to rid the world of the "monsters" who attack us? Well, they own all of this.

The problem lies not in the individual, but in the society that breeds these "monsters", a society in which one seeks dominion over another, in which Man dominates Woman, in which White dominates Black, in which Man dominates Nature - though don't expect the ringmasters of this three-ring circus to tell you that; after all, they would hate to reveal the magic behind their act. The irony of it all is, the more they rile us with their caustic rhetoric, the more tense, the more violent our society becomes.

Allow yourselves to think back to Sir Isaac Newton's discovery of a very fundamental attribute of our physical realm: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Perhaps you're wondering, "How do the laws of Physics have anything to do with any of this?" Simple: nothing happens in isolation; our mental and emotional states are linked to the physical world. When we hear these vitriolic diatribes on the radio, see them on television, or read them in the newspaper, we react with vitriol ourselves. When we lay a nation to waste in response to an attack on our soil, its citizens respond in kind. When we raid apartment complexes in low-income neighbourhoods searching for "thugs", the locals respond in kind. When we push problems away by locking the perpetrators in jail, they push us back with full force in the form of more perpetrators.

It's high time we stop reacting and start responding in an appropriate manner. It's time we take the pen out of the hand of the master and start writing new acts for this script ourselves. It's time to recognize the "monster" in the mirror before we talk of vanquishing any in our society (see Matthew 7:3), or else we will remain forever bound by this charade.