‘The Joker’: Genuineness and conflict

By Tim Trenkle

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The headline at the curbside vendor grabbed every reader. “Many killed in rampage.” The televised news panned closer to the blood. The car radio broadcast about booby traps. The weekly magazine arrived, evinced red dyed hair - “The Joker.”

Read the Batman movieola: “Violence jumped from screen.”

Batman, once a comic, today his Hollywood director tells us how to feel through the eulogy packed into the new movie trailers.

Mass killings, the chaos of our age, are put inside frames the media hangs in our homes. They affect our judgment. The news choreographer suggests how we should feel.

Today the media run a ritual as sure as Sunday church. Horror casts into our lives in nets. Our attention is demanded. The media clamor for agreement, attention, feelings. If you follow the cues, you will model the expected.

Thinking for yourself is not the idea.

Somewhere, the news cycle found you and said, “It was horrible. Shock, fear, sadness and confusion.”

Do you feel it? Really? You may ask, “What's going on?” But do you really feel these emotions? The scene is 1,000 miles away.

At first the media send a patchwork message. Police and firemen are interviewed. A survivor is front and center. Gun rights activists refer to the right to bear arms. Pacifists say guns are a problem. A priest, a minister, a rabbi speak.

“I'm horrified. I'm shocked,” they say as they present curiously impassive faces.

Do they really feel these things? It's important. It's crucial you know how you feel. When the man from your hometown is highlighted. you may feel an alliance. It's not the same.

I know many who did not feel much of anything during 9/11. A local counselor said she didn't feel these terrors from the Colorado killings. She said the killings diminish everyone. That's genuine.

This, then, concerns the conflict about who you are. Believe it or not.

First proposed by the eminent psychologist Carl Rogers, genuineness is conceived as a core condition of health. Herein is theory that the most important conflict we face is between what society tells us and what we know about ourselves.

Ernest Hemingway said that the toughest thing to do is to know how you truly feel, not how you are expected to feel or how you were taught or told to feel.

In the hours of facing the tragedy, it is wise to know yourself and not someone you're expected to be. How do you feel?

In itself, that may be the origin of one lone gunman's madness, one deranged man calling himself “The Joker.”

Tim Trenkle of Dubuque teaches psychology and writing at Northeast Iowa Community College. Comments: peace 2work@yahoo.com