I love The Walking Dead. Once I get past the gore, I see it mirror the brutality of a modern world. A world, where in one country, a woman is raped every 20 minutes.
Amidst the rehash of and a promise to appeal the Steubenville rape trial verdict, I ask myself “Where is the outrage?” What, in our culture, has allowed us to generate people who have so little regard for their fellow human beings? Do the cavalier personas exhibited by impaired teen-agers violating a passive victim illustrate a sort of zombie apocalypse? Living, cognitive humans treated another person like a thing. Without empathy. Without sympathy. Without compassion. Is this type of behavior symptomatic of a society infected with a pandemic of maleficence?
I ask “Where are the women?” Where are the young girls of the victim’s social group? By their lack of action, they behaved with complicity. Was there no one to stand up for the victim? For their futures, they should scream for real justice and watch in shock as verdicts and light sentences define their value as assessed by this tragedy set in Anytown, USA.
What happened to feminism? Yes, dated, outrageous, but angry, bra-burning feminism! Forty years ago, young women associated that term with choices, not just about birth control and abortion, but careers, marriage, buying a home, living independently, competing, achieving, and fighting back. I remember a nurse friend of mine helping another nurse, abused by her husband, move out of her home in the middle of the night. Women supporting women. Is feminism dormant? Or is it so changed that its modern focus on climbing the corporate ladder and the economic indicators of success has marginalized the common woman. She comes from a modest background, hopes to get to college, graduates with a $40,000 college debt. She aspires to live alone, buy a car, and have a little left over. She is the one with the right to jog alone at night without being touched and without being labeled as “asking for it.”
Where were the parents? In the late sixties, I hosted a party planned strategically on a night when I knew my parents would be away. We snuck a few tastes of liquor, watering it down so the level in the bottle didn’t drop. I considered myself defiant and daring. I didn’t realize how well my mother knew me. She mastered the skill of paying attention. Two hours after my friends arrived, my parents did as well. Unexpectedly. Something I had done, something I said, too many phone calls by a person who usually talked to just one or two friends, alerted Mom’s radar.
Our children are blitzed by movies and television with adult content at a time when parents seem less and less present as parents. When did it become all right to have hormone-enraged teen-agers party without supervision?
In The Walking Dead, a human knows where he stands when he is surrounded by “biters” or “walkers.” They eat. They survive. It is among the humans that each character must watch his back. Welcome to the teen culture of Steubenville.
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