Watching 12 Years a Slave in theaters was an interesting experience. There was a woman beside me who found it difficult to watch and she visibly squirmed at some of the harsher sequences. A steady diet of horror films has numbed me to such on-screen atrocities, but what I found more horrifying was the thought behind the act. I've seen torture plenty of times but this was in an era when such acts were not only legal, but institutionalized. The true horror was how such depravity was accepted because it was simply the way they lived. If that's the rationalization for every injustice in this world, can you imagine how fucked up we can get? It's a surprise we haven't succumbed to the depths of despair yet. Either that's a credit to "progress" or maybe our civilization really does operate on inherent "goodness."
Those views have changed and culturally, we see everybody as human now. But there are those who sadly cling to ideals rooted in prejudice and hate for no other reason than because that was how they were raised. I still remember the first time I learned about Martin Luther King in third grade. I had no concept of how far we've gone because his "dream" seemed like the most obvious thing in the world. It made no sense, but that's the innocence of childhood at work. Just as how the concept of a racially diverse world seemed totally obvious, the opposite could also be true for another kid growing up--and that's the unknown tragedy.
I consider myself a fairly progressive guy. I think gay marriage should be legalized because denying them that right makes them second-class citizens, which is a totally foreign idea in a supposedly "modern" world. I take issue with laws where its intended purpose has been perverted for the sake of suppressing minorities (or that was the original intent all along). There are many injustices in this society, and I'd like to think that I recognize them, but I can't help but wonder if progress would soon outdate my ideas.
What if, one day, the future looks back on the views I held and find me culpable for holding back progress in some issue I couldn't even conceive of at the time? What if it turned out that plants are conscious living beings and all those times we mowed our lawns amounted to massacre? It's a ridiculous example, but it's not without precedent. There was a time when it was accepted that the world was flat. Science is not absolute, it's only goes as far as we can prove it. This is a particularly salient point since "science" has been used to justify certain views, such as homosexuality as an "aberration." The point is that issues exist even when we can't see them, and even when we do, we can't pretend not to.
Even in gaming, a hobby I hold dear to my heart, there are issues dealing with sex. Announcing yourself as female in certain gaming communities is akin to painting a big red target on your back for harassment. And I need not mention the prevalence of sexist remarks or racial slurs in not only online gaming, but even on things like Twitch chat. The standard excuse is that the "internet is going to internet" but that's fucking goddamned cop-out.
Funnily enough, I see Google and Facebook moving towards a more personally-identifiable future (probably because it's more profitable to market to actual people instead of online personalities), but as a side effect, it might introduce accountability for the things people say online. If Facebook and Twitter is tied to every account, it's much easier to track who said what in the seemingly anonymous web space. With kids growing up with social networking as a fact of life, I think we will see a greater acceptance and integration between real and digital life, and I sincerely hope this will change the way we interface with each other. Maybe one day, the kid who screams insults online will be held accountable when players can click his name, go straight to his Facebook page, and flag his parents. Maybe.
We still have a long way to go, and there will always be people who wish to say controversial things. On the flip side, we may even accept that people have ugly sides to them, sides that seek to scream and yell out terrible things if only because that's all it'll amount to. Maybe the things we say aren't a part of who we really are, and that by stating them, we can better find ourselves. It's a strange idea, but I think there's merit to it. There's a reason why so many people continue to misrepresent themselves online, why they roleplay, and become entirely different entities. Like with the rest of humanity, you gotta take the good with the bad.
I can't believe I just wrote a whole freakin' essay. All I wanted to say is that 12 Years a Slave is a movie that everybody should watch.
