An Editorial By Mr. Nevermore
posted at 9:11 AM on Tuesday, April 24th, 2001
America is a sick nation. It is not because our health care system is ineffectual, which it may be. It is not because we take terrible care of our bodies and fully one third of all adult Americans and one in five children are obese. No, the cause of the great American sickness is this finger-pointing, "anywhere but here" culture of blame which plagues our public discourse. Ours is a society of victims, large and small. These victims aren't meek, nor seeking justice or a sense of peace. They are aggressive, indiscriminate, and looking to stab the flaming finger of blame into anything that will spew out monetary compensation. The Columbine High School shooting in Littleton Colorado of two years ago placed an entire nation's children under a blanket of both suspicion and fear. Thirteen families lost the most precious parts of their lives on Tuesday, April 20, 1999, and in the days and weeks that followed, teachers and students sat wondering if there was a child in their class who was capable of an act of unprovoked violence against his or her peers and educators. As a direct result, a very precious sense of safety was stolen from parents. Both those who so unfortunately lost their loved ones, and those were spared from such suffering could no longer view their children's school as a protected sphere, where children are educated in relative peace. Unfortunately, the side effect of this or any personal theft is all too often degeneration towards the egotistical values that I identified earlier. It all boils down to money. Before I get any further into this, I suppose I should state the following: It is my opinion that the families of the victims of the Columbine school shooting deserve to be compensated. It is absolutely impossible to place a value on a human life, but since big time civil lawyers only know how to deal in dead presidents, monetary compensation is the only way to reach a satisfactory conclusion. However, what I first learned through Stomped, and later confirmed by reading their source, an article at the Denver Post Online, is that it is not the amount of culpability which determines the target of a civil lawsuit. If such were the case, a suit filed against the parties that let the guns fall into the children's hands should account for justice. Rather, the determining factor for selection of a target is the padding of its wallet. Linda Sanders, the wife of slain Columbine High School teacher Dave Sanders, has filed a class action lawsuit for more than 5 billion dollars against 25 media companies, the majority of which are game manufacturers or distributers such as Nintendo Co. I'd like to repeat that little statistic once more because it seems marginally important. In excess of 5 billion dollars are being sought in this lawsuit, and yet the lawyer in charge of the prosecution, John DeCamp, has the wherewithal to say, "But money may be the smallest part of the goal... This is a class action that says that, ultimately, money ain't gonna do it." Really, now? So we must be left to assume that the motivation of Mr. DeCamp to sue for such a outrageous sum of money, other than to line every edge of his Nebraska home with diamonds, is to punish the gaming and media industries for creating monsters which turn our schools into the battlegrounds they see and interact with. Mr. DeCamp, Ms. Sanders, you are inflicted with our great American sickness, and you have laid down your cards with an unmistakable ignorance. I will not, however, criticize Mr. DeCamp or Ms. Sanders for their ignorance on this topic, for to do that would be to scapegoat them the way they have chosen to scapegoat the gaming industry. In truth, their ignorance is not their fault. There is a long growing trend in the United States to charge the media in its many forms with the unpleasant attributes that we see arise in our young people. In a logical continuation of this development, violent video games- which are new, controversial and misunderstood- are feared, and a book burning mentality replaces an effort at comprehension. Nintendo's inclusion in this lawsuit alone speaks of uninformed decision making. At the very least, Nintendo has been the absolute last party to loosen its control of violent content in its video games. Only recently have games with violent content such as Goldeneye, Perfect Dark and Conker's Bad Fur Day been allowed onto a Nintendo gaming console. And let's face it, anyone gamer who's played a real first person shooter knows that they require a mouse. Therefore we're left with Samus, Mario, Link and Kirby as the sinister influences from Nintendo. Leave poor cracked-out Yamauchi-san out of this! I wonder if this is the type of poor reception he alluded to when threatening to can the Game Cube for America. Onwards to Page 2
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