A few days ago I started thinking about it somehow. Recently, Andrius wrote that he saw a movie about students who were terrorized by their classmates until they revenged big time (blog post in Lithuanian). Game Producer wrote that he as well as many of his readers liked virtually pestering his friends. When coming back from work, I noticed two teenagers strangling each other for fun. I saw a group of guys with a girl where one of the guys was trying to catch the girl’s attention by destroying different things on the way. Also there were two drunken guys in Hackescher Markt where one of them pushed me with his shoulder. What’s happening!?
I’ll be Sigmund today and state that everybody is lack of sex!
A flashback from my studying times came to my mind. One evening I and my friends were waiting next to a student dormitory for a friend from Lithuanian province. He came down to meet us with bloody fist.
“What happened?” we asked. He answered: “I was going down by elevator, drinking beer, and some loser stood next to me. He said: ‘may I have a sip of your beer?’ I hit that f*cker into the face. He shouldn’t have asked that!”
He was really a strange guy. Whenever he was drunken, he always needed either girls, or street fight (blog post in Lithuanian comparing aggressive soccer fans with spermatozoids)!
Or everybody is lack of attention and tenderness…
“Is it safe in Berlin?”, Justas asked me that week when I had a lot of guests and when we three were going with bare feet through a fountain to the tram.
“It seems safer here than in Vilnius…”, I answered remembering an incident last year when a gang of half-naked sporty young gentlemen were attacking passers-by (and there was not enough place for them in the police car).
Then just at the TV tower a fat-elephant-like Nazi girl left her friends, caught up with us, realized that we are not Germans, hit Živilė to her eye, got frightened of her own behavior and possible consequences, and ran away trying to cover her own shock with laugh. Some blond girl came to the fat one and asked: “What happened there?”. The fat one answered giggling: “I hit that girl to the face!”
I was standing with Justas at a loss. Should we go and revenge or what? There was a police car just behind the corner. Should we go and complain there? WTF!?
Physical violence directed to a person happens very rarely in Berlin. It goes towards things much more often. For example, lately I saw two guys (about 23 year old) with their girls going nearby. One of the guys imagining to be very cool, kicked a placard, went a few steps, and punched an empty bottle standing on a platform, so that the bottle fell down and splintered. Cool, isn’t it!? Probably, it’s all like that because of the German image of murderers in the worldwide context which was achieved after the Second World War and because of German psychological problem about that (blog post in Lithuanian mentioning the German psychological problem). “We are not murderers. We are cleverer. We are just strong.”
Ex-colleague told me once that when he was a child, he went to Great Britain by bus with his classmates. They stopped at some province. And then the local villagers (even the adult ones) threw stones at them as if they were world’s worst criminals. But they were just children.
Where is all this aggression from?
Long ago I saw a publicistic broadcast in Germany about some disease which affects many teenagers for a few years. The symptoms of the disease are hyperactivity, aggression, and anger. Patent’s brothers and sisters suffer most of all in big families.
Ehmm.. I am totally against physical aggression directed towards people. But then why do I like playing GTA, Postal 2, Prince of Persia, and other games which have features of aggression?
Life is beautiful.
UPDATE. This is an excerpt from an interview with Karmapa Lama, Trinley Dorje, the only senior Buddhist leader recognized by Beijing, the Tibetans and India; after telling that hip-hop perhaps is one way of him being a 21st-century person:
Is that why you play war games on your play station because many might say it’s inappropriate for a Buddhist monk dedicated to peace to play war games?
Well, I view video games as something of an emotional therapy, a mundane level of emotional therapy for me. We all have emotions whether we’re Buddhist practitioners or not, all of us have emotions, happy emotions, sad emotions, displeased emotions and we need to figure out a way to deal with them when they arise.
So, for me sometimes it can be a relief, a kind of decompression to just play some video games. If I’m having some negative thoughts or negative feelings, video games are one way in which I can release that energy in the context of the illusion of the game. I feel better afterwards.
The aggression that comes out in the video game satiates whatever desire I might have to express that feeling. For me, that’s very skilful because when I do that I don’t have to go and hit anyone over the head.
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