Deer in Aberdeen, Bambi Effect, and Poor Little Muslim, Central American Kids
Maybe it started back when the parlor Victrola introduced canned music and emotions as a substitute for the real thing. Aren’t family relationships a shadow of what they once were?
Now television and movies supply a dramatic world with personalities and celebrities that seem more intimate and genuine. Headphones easily call up emotion-drenched songs for a drug-like fix, before the attention quickly passes on to some other tasty piece of entertainment.
The recent menacing by rogue deer in small US towns like Aberdeen, South Dakota, remind us that our moral compass as sympathy-seeking humans doesn’t mesh easily with the animal kingdom. “Kill the intruders who are destroying my landscaping” is on the lips of angry citizens. They may have just come from mainstream evening news broadcasts (PBS, CBS, ABC, BBC, and NBC) which have immersed them in sympathetic acceptance of big-eyed kids suffering racial discrimination at the US border and in Gaza. “Shame on Americans and Israelis” who have killed Bambi, the sentiment seems to unfold.
Bambi? Yes, the Bambi Effect, as explained in Wikipedia, highlights an unresolved conflict in the public psyche: “a term used anecdotally or in editorial media that refers to objections against the killing of charismatic megafauna (animals that are perceived as ‘cute’ or ‘adorable’, such as deer or dolphins), while there may be little or no objection to the suffering of organisms that are perceived as somehow repulsive or less than desirable, such as spiders or an endangered fungus and other woodland creatures.”
People in the West who get their moral compass from watching news media portraying closeup “human interest” depictions of suffering children in wartime Gaza and “refugees” from Central America certainly are influenced by the Bambi Effect, widespread in US culture: “Among some butchers, the Bambi effect (and in general, Walt Disney’s anthropomorphic characters) is credited with fueling the vegetarian movement; chefs use the term to describe customers’ lack of interest in, for instance, whole fish: ‘It’s the Bambi effect – [customers] don’t want to see eyes looking at them'”, reports Wikipedia.
The cultural conflict is more than just personal, but enters into public policy at all levels, though unwittingly for most. Being schizoid (that is, “resembling schizophrenia in having inconsistent or contradictory elements”) has become normal, and therefore invisible.
