Perhaps the violence is good for us.

There is an ebb and flow to war. We fight, we die, and we are disgusted. Then we return home to our sanguine traditions, become self important and self righteous. By now, a generation has passed, taking with it the scarred reality of war. The new generation, seeing only heroes, marches off once more to start the cycle.

Maybe, then, the violence on TV isn’t all that bad. Sure, kids are kicking the bejesus out of each other in back yard imitating Jet Li’s latest computer assisted take off maneuver, but is that so different from the generation before? We threw grenades, stormed bunkers, and compared the relative strengths and witnesses of Christmas and birthday gifts cum armaments. “Look! This one actually recoils!” “Hey, this one’s painted camo!” “Why do they have to put these stupid orange things on the end?” Realism was the name of the game. We were all set too, considering that most warfare today does in fact require a small team of young men to invade a living room or backyard. Little did we know.

That’s the old historiography. The new historiography might take as its model not the cyclical market model, but that of the bursting techno-bubble seen recently and still felt. Perhaps WWI and II were not the next wave since the 100 years war, the various revolutions, armadas, détentes, and armistices. “Armistices”— perhaps one of the most awkward plurals in the English language. Perhaps WWI and WWII were the bubble of the industrial revolution. Even we did not understand the level of devastation we could wield through mass production, and as a result, we spent the better part of 4 decades cleaning up the mess. In that case, the Cold War stayed cold, not from the offsetting interests of conflicting ideologies, but from the collective fear of our own technology. Traders today see it in the inching and retreating market indexes, inching hesitatingly upwards so as to show none of the prior hedonistic exuberance. The message passed to generations future is simple: don’t chase any innovation too far too fast. We’ve done it twice in rapid succession and the fallout isn’t pretty.

In either case, we set up for a new millennium. If history is regressively predictive, we will see a major conflict in the first two decades. (WWI, 1914-1919; War of 1812, War of Spanish and Succession, 1702-1713; and Thirty Years War 1618.). Of course, one can say that of any part of any year, but even so, we may have broken at least part of the cycle. Now that every 12 year old in America as seen a violate clash on screen, seen a man’s head ripped off, seen the news reports on bombings and battles. Perhaps with an information economy, there are enough images to let people relive these instances in more visceral detail. Maybe now, when we need not go out to the battlefield to see the horror it wreaks, we can spend more time remembering before we rush to justify shiny memorials. And, yes, we are less sensitive to violence in some ways. No, I don’t think that visuals can make up for reality. But I do have faith that people can readily distinguish reality from unreality – perhaps more so now as we’ve grown discerning in our taste for special effects. I have faith that people can use these images to better relate to others what war really means.

On the other hand, there are the governments that send the troops to war. The images are there now, but will they be shown as the hue and cry to battle sounds. Perhaps it will; perhaps a few with the will to disseminate these images will remind the rest of us that pride and honor and power are no match for dirty, hungry, alone and afraid. Then, maybe this violence has not been so bad for us.