The Child Who is Not Embraced
“If only people were nicer to that mass murderer, maybe they wouldn’t have had to mass murder all those people.”
– What I hear when people invoke this saying
I’ve seen the saying, “The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth,” has become quite popular in recent times, but there’s always been something about it that’s irked me – and not just because it’s often attributed to “an African proverb,” despite there being no evidence that’s ever been the case. Moreso, I feel like its underlying message basically amounts to, “We should take care of our most vulnerable people, or else they’ll kill us,” whereas my personal philosophy is, “We should take care of our most vulnerable people because, like, that’s just what a fucking society is supposed to do? I’m sorry, was compassion and kindness never in our collective understanding of what a functioning society entailed? Because correct me if I’m wrong, I may have just been misinformed this entire time!”
We often see this saying applied to things like mass murderers and mental illness, which especially bothers me because those with mental illness are more commonly the victims of violence as opposed to the perpetrators. And that’s actually one of the major reasons I never really liked the 2019 Joker film – it feels like it perpetuates the harmful misunderstanding of mentally ill people being inherently dangerous. I’ve seen people say Joker accurately represents truth in fiction, but I feel like if that was the case, it suggests our real life parallels to Arthur Fleck – an otherwise perfectly nice and amiable guy who is neglected, impoverished, and mentally unwell – would be the same people as those who parallel the Joker – violent, murderous criminals.
And I just wonder, do you guys actually believe that? That the unstable killers in our world were once Arthur Flecks? Because from what I’ve seen, the Arthur Flecks are just invisible in our society, and often remain that way, making it easy for us to ignore them. And we do, mostly, with no risk of harm to ourselves. I just feel like the fact that they are people who are suffering should be motivation enough for us, as a society, to extend them aid; we shouldn’t need a threat of violence to do so. But again, correct me if I’m wrong, I may have just been misinformed this entire time.
– James
