After reading and discussing Mojo Mickybo this week, I definitely gained more of an emotional sense of what went on in Northern Ireland during “The Troubles.” By writing about problems through the eyes of children, Owen McCafferty criticizes Northern Ireland’s culture of violence and division. The portrayal of these young boys’ loss of innocence makes the audience realize the profound impacts of violence and hate that perpetuate society. People tend to see children as universally innocent and deserving of no harm, no matter where they come from or to what group they identify. McCafferty uses this human tendency to demonstrate how the violence and hate perpetuated by the adults in kids’ lives affects how children think, act, and feel. He implies that hate is not a natural human tendency, but is taught to us through socialization. The boys live in a world filled with childlike wonder even though they are surrounded by violence and war. At the end, when the boys are no longer friends, McCafferty shows how there is no hope for unity and friendship among groups as long as the societies that they are living in teach them to hate one another.
When reading this text, I made the connection to how it is common for young people now to generalize all old people as racist. We mostly attribute it to the generation in which they were born, where they were taught the racism and hate in their households, schools, and other communities growing up. The fact that kids in America now seem to have less racial prejudice than their elders shows that prejudice is not a natural human tendency but taught by society. So although there is still much work to be done in terms of racism in America, today’s children show that there is hope, as long as we try our best to not teach them hate and prejudice.
I am interested in this idea that you express regarding hate suppressing a society’s capacity to create friendships and unity. Between differing groups of people, as you say, this is certainly the case; hatred between groups is destructive of all relationships between them— even those of their children. However, time and again people have become contented to hate people that differ from them. And I think it is because perhaps that they do not generally lack friendship and unity. Rather, they find it in abundance within their own “group.” That is, racist white people do not find themselves lacking friendship and unity because they find it amongst themselves. In fact, I think that hatred can often lead to a greater sense of unity as it brings horrid people together under a common goal that is hating others. As awful as it sounds, I feel that we have seen this many times in history; hatred simply becomes the norm in communities such as that of the non-Jewish Germans during the holocaust. When you are united in hatred it becomes easy to excuse one’s own actions as acceptable despite how horrid they may truly be. I think it would be interesting to see if somehow there were a way to divide these groups of hateful people that continually feed off of each other. Perhaps once divided they might better recognize their wrongdoings and also feel that lack of friendship and unity they once felt. This might then cause these hateful individuals, now stranded alone in their beliefs, to yearn for love and lose their immoral ways.
You make some great points. I think it’s always important to not generalize. It’s very difficult to not broadly categorize people, but hate often leads to bad places. The difficult thing about hate though is that it can lead towards great change. Being upset about recent events or the behaviors of certain people can be what best fuels protest, violent or peaceful. I also feel that people have a right to be upset, especially when oppressed for so long. I think we should avoid unnecessarily hurting others, but I think the expression of being hurt and put down for so long is important too. In the texts we’ve been reading I’ve felt that the stories will often sympathize with the oppressed group of people, or at the very least, try to create a story with characters that help the audience to meet somewhere in the middle. This is despite the fact that sometimes the oppressed people would retaliate in violent or hateful ways. This hate was reciprocated though. People don’t act violently without reason, and it was only because of the cruel behaviors of others that people felt hopeless.
I would like to offer this question in response to your post: What is more important between a person’s core beliefs and the deeply rooted beliefs of a society in deciding how someone will react to societal problems? Taking your racism example, while it seems clear that older generations tend to be more racist than younger ones, there clearly exists elderly people who are not racist, and younger people who are. I would argue that hate is a natural tendency for humans. Whether it comes to the surface may be a product of the environment, but ultimately I think it’s a person’s mindset towards a certain group of people that causes them to either love or hate. I hope this is not true, and that we can weed out racism and prejudice over time in our society, but sadly, I think there will always be people who just can’t set aside their differences.
The idea that “McCafferty shows how there is no hope for unity and friendship among groups as long as the societies that they are living in teach them to hate one another” made me think about our discussion of the message of both Liam O’Flattery’s version of The Informer and of Uptight. In particular, I was reminded of our conversation about nihilism and hope. Something that seems to connect all three stories is that they end in defeat. They do not have your typical Hollywood ending where the protagonist succeeds against all odds and rides off into the sunset. The protagonists even die at the end of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
Something about the end of Mojo Mickybo felt different to me, though. The scene when Mojo is pleading with Mickybo to acknowledge that Mojo did not steal Mickybo’s bike is this poignant moment when one boy begs the other to transcend the conflict between them. While we know that the boys do not reconcile, this moments felt to me like a glimpse of the possibility. I felt myself straining while reading the play, willing that Mickybo would just refuse to sacrifice the friendship. It left me wondering if McCafferty wanted us to think about the possibility that we might be close to peace, that there is hope.
I agree that the society and environment children grow up in is what causes them to act the way they do and grow up into the people they are, but I wonder if certain factors can have greater effects on children versus others. While there was ongoing violence around Mojo and Mickybo their whole childhoods, it was also said in the play that they watched Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, so could factors like media cause the violence they were surrounded by to be exacerbated and glorified in their minds? It definitely seems like media today greatly affects children’s outlook on life, possibly even more than things they learn at home, so if their media was cut off, how would this affect their violent tendencies and outlooks? If the boys in the play had seen less violence in movies and the media and news, would they have been better off? Did the fact that they were so aware of the violence make it easier for Mickybo to cope with his dad’s murder? Would it have been better for them to be more sheltered?