Media matters. The things we watch get behind our eyes. The things we listen to don’t just go in one ear and out the other. The entertainment we pick for ourselves isn’t just entertainment.
This is a tried and true Plugged In dogma. On one level or another, pretty much everyone agrees that no one can be utterly immune to the power of story, the impact of pictures, the seduction of sound. And yet we rarely live as if we really believed it. So it’s important to keep coming back to the subject, trying to find new and fresh ways to convince ourselves.
And sometimes old and stale ways, too.
I grew up in the country. My family raised rabbits—for pets, for pelts and for food. So maybe it was to be expected that when I first read Richard Adams’ Watership Down, a story about displaced and desperate bunnies, I was quite taken with it. You might even say it influenced my thinking about the animals we were raising.
Now let’s go back even further in time (as if that were possible, smirks my 8th-grade daughter). By the 1920s, white-tailed deer had been hunted to near extinction in America. According to journalist David Von Drehle, writing for Time, while the beasts were once plentiful throughout North America, “a child born around 1930 stood a pretty good chance of outliving the last white-tailed deer in the U.S.” Now they’re all around us again, with some experts saying that there are more of these deer in 2014 than there were when Columbus first arrived in the 1400s. Herd populations are reportedly up 800% since the mid-1900s, reaching about 32 million.
Why?
Well, some say it’s all because of Bambi.
Writes Drehle in his article “Time to Cull the Herd”:
A sense of loss, even doom, hung over the U.S. publication of Felix Salten’s novel Bambi, translated from German in 1928 by a left-wing intellectual named Whittaker Chambers. But Walt Disney, among others, imagined a different ending. As Chambers morphed into a conservative and the child of 1930 approached her teen years, Disney’s studio made Bambi into the animated masterpiece credited with helping turn a nation in love with Buffalo Bill into the conservation-minded American of today.
Seriously. A movie saved the white-tailed deer? Yes, a movie started the process of changing the way an entire nation thought about hunting, about wildlife, about the land we live in.
Should we then not wholeheartedly start acting like we really do believe entertainment helps to push us in either a godly or sinful direction?
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