Friday, May 25, 2007

Fighting a losing war

... against video games that is. It's been revealed that the governor of Illinois blew a $1 million trying to ban violent video games, which (last I checked) were protected by the First Amendment.

"The governor raided funds throughout state government to pay for the litigation. Some of the areas money was taken from included the public health department, the state's welfare agency and even the economic development department."
Well, it appears that public health and support for the poor is just not as important as trying to make a conservative political statement. "Some lawmakers who voted for it called it a bad law, but said they had to go along for political reasons."

That, my friends, is the crux of our problem. This game problem will go away in about 10 to 20 years, when the first gamer generation becomes old enough to yank the political agenda away from the gnarled hands of the boomers. Until that happens, we will continue to be targeted because the video game issue is not a violence issue, it's not a censorship issue nor even a moral content issue. It is a generation issue.

The birth of console games occurred in the 80's, which means that anyone over 40 will not understand growing up with games, violent or not. I'm sure the same thing happened to rock and roll; no one worries about it now because the opinion and policy makers of today grew up on that stuff. This ban/censorship thing won't go away because it's easier to point at issues you don't know rather than deal with the issues you do know.

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