Cruelty

In Monday’s class, we discussed lynchings, as it applied to Richard Wright’s “Between the World and Me”, in this poem, the narrator lists several deaths that could occur during lynchings. We further discussed the idea of how the bodies of the people who were lynched were dessecrated and further mauled, even after the person had died. People would have picnics as they watched these people harmed for intertainment, and it made me begin to wonder how and why people can watch someone else get maimed for intertainment.

The more I thought about it, the more I wondered about the nature of people. Even outside of war, we take joy in another person’s pain.We laugh when someone falls down the stairs, there are television shows (America’s funniest home videos, almost all of the reality televisoin shows) dedicated to the humiliation of people, and there are television shows only comprised of people being hurt while trying to comlplete tricks for extreme sports, car crashes, etc. There are even six videos of Sadam Hussien’s hanging on youtube.

At first, I was at awe of the cruelty that people displayed towards eachother during the lynchings, but we still portray the same cruelty towards one-another today. I guess I’m trying to figure out why.