I was walking along 5th Ave. in Park Slope yesterday in search of one of those little ironing boards. The weather was nice on a late Sunday afternoon, so there were lots of people on the street and it was easy to overhear all kinds of things. There were three boys (two black and one Hispanic) just hanging out and as I passed by I heard them talking, saying:
Boy one: How old are you?
Boy two: Eight, going on nine? (that ‘going on nine’ is VERY important to an eight year old!)
Boy one: You work?
Boy two: Yeah.
Boy one: Why do you work?
Boy two: To buy video games!!!! (Like, why else would I work, stupid!)
I was listening to a story on NPR the other day. The story topic was the decline in the percentage of Americans who visit our national parks. While the over all number of visitors has increased over the past twenty or so years, the percentage of the population visiting the parks has dramatically decreased. Why?
One ‘expert’ believed that he could trace the beginning of the decline to the rise of youth video-game use. How can the national parks compete with video-games? How can much of anything compete with video-games among young people?
Several months ago, I read a story of a company determined to create and sell ‘Christian video-games.’ An example: the Crusades! So, a video-game where good, strong, upstanding knights during the Crusades kill bad, evil Muslims as the godly knights battle to retake Jerusalem from the infidels. Nice, huh? I suspect that for these good Christian video-game creators, it is terrible for thugs to kill each other over cars or drugs or whatever, but it is glorious for Christian knights to kill Muslims. I guess consistency of belief goes out the window when it comes to video-games and our attempts to persuade non-Christian youth that we, as Christians, are in fact as cool as they are!