The Difference Between Moral And Amoral Violence

Every once in a while, my two youngest adult children will come over and hook up the X-Box to play video games on my large screen television and, ordinarily, I would ignore their game sessions. But this time the game had highly sophisticated graphics that caught my eye and I was stunned by the realism.

The scene on the screen, however, was a crowded airport in a foreign country and, suddenly, men wearing combat gear and carrying assault weapons entered the waiting room. My son pressed the buttons on his game pad and the guns blasted the crowd of people standing at the ticket line. Over and over the gunmen controlled by my son mowed down what appeared to be innocent, unarmed civilians.

"Whoa!" I said. "That's disgusting." And I was told I didn't understand the game. I didn't know what the game was all about. It was named "Call of Duty - Modern Warfare 2." Supposedly, I had to know the story behind the game and who the characters are. "Baloney!" I said.

Therein followed a heated discussion about whether games such as this incited gratuitous acts of violence. "It's a game, Mom. You just don't get it. It's a game about fighting terrorism."

"That's easy for you to think because you're a well adjusted young man," I retorted. "But somewhere out there there's a warped mind that gets far too much enjoyment seeing people die like that at the push of a button."

"Well, then, a video game isn't going to make any difference. This game wasn't out when the Columbine shooting occurred," my son countered, shaking his head as if to say, "You just don't understand."

"On the contrary. You don't understand that we live in a culture that desensitizes death. This isn't a game showing decent warriors attacking cruel regime soldiers that torture and kill innocent citizens. This fantasizes wholesale slaughter and makes it fun."

I then pulled up on my computer a video that I was sent about Nigerian security forces killing unarmed civilians. This video can be seen on YouTube with a warning about its graphic content under the title "Nigeria security forces kill 'unarmed civilians.'" Anyone surfing this site can witness the real slaughter of innocent men, women and children on both sides of religions and ethnicities. Life is cheap on the Web and in the Third World.

While the video was loading, I muttered, "I hate violence." My son laughed at this remark and said, "Mom, you read bloody murder mysteries and you love all the Vince Flynn books with Mitch Rapp and the Navy SEALs he works with. All he does is kill terrorists."

I admit that my literary taste runs towards murder mysteries but when it comes to the Flynn novels, I had to make the distinction that "Rapp and the others are still moral people just doing their jobs to protect the country. They don't blow up innocent people on a bus or poison the waters that will kill thousands. They don't set off IEDs nor do they shoot up an airport with waiting passengers. Oh, and they don't fly commercial airliners into skyscrapers." (I forgot to include the would-be shoe and underwear bombers in the list of terror subjects.)

I happen to believe in just wars and when we're dealing with amoral barbarians that regard all life as cheap, we need to do whatever keeps them away from our door. Sorry, but that includes waterboarding.

We're living in such a warped society that it views nothing wrong with entertainment that glamorizes utter mayhem and the gratuitous murder of the innocent and unarmed. When it comes to the reality of real terror and war, common sense is totally absent.

Consider the fact that three heroic Navy SEALs are being court-martialed for punching out one of the most wanted terrorists in Iraq - Ahmed Hashim Abed, the alleged mastermind of the murder and mutilation of four Blackwater USA security guards in Fallujah in 2004.

Does anyone recall the horrible scene in Fallujah where the bodies of the American security guards were dragged through the streets and eventually burned and hung on the upper trusses of a bridge?

The brutal murderers gathered around to celebrate and have their photos taken with their trophies. The Navy Seals later captured the leader of the terrorist butchers and brought him to justice. Or did they?

In this politically correct environment, that "poor terrorist" deserves courteous treatment and those nasty Navy SEALs should have refrained from giving him a fat lip.

One would think by now that we've learned that political correctness kills. Thus, Army officials chose to ignore that Major Nidal Malik Hasan's jihadist rants were serious and thus P.C. allowed him to murder 14 people - counting the unborn baby of Pfc. Francheska Velez - and wound 30 at Fort Hood.

Three Republican members of Congress and several retired Navy SEALs recently held a press conference demanding that the Pentagon exonerate the accused Seals.

"These Navy SEALs were apprehending a terrorist murderer, and they are being accused of roughing him up? Give me a break! These men should be given medals, not prosecuted. These men are heroes," Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of California said.

But there is more to this story that needs to be clarified. The three Navy SEALs requested the court martial rather than a nonjudicial punishment.

That may be because they want to expose the absurd P.C. decisions of today's military. The accused are being charged with disobeying laws regarding the treatment of prisoners.

However, the public needs to make sure that those rules do not hinder national security and the safety of our military. If they do, then those rules need to be rescinded.

This is now a military overseen by an administration that will punish maltreatment of known terrorists but give due process to the mastermind of the September 11th attacks and the attempted bombing of an American airliner. Go figure.

I, for one, wish that Mitch Rapp and his fictional SEAL comrades were real. There would far fewer detainees in Gitmo for the ACLU and our terrorist-enabling Department of Justice to worry about.

Alicia Colon resides in New York City and can be reached at aliciav.colon@gmail.com and at www.aliciacolon.com