14 DAY TRIAL // One of the hallmarks of the rise of the Nazis in pre-WWII Germany was the habit of book burning. When a book was not really in tune with the official line, it got burnt rather quickly. You'd think that now, more than 70 years later, this kind of practices, also enjoyed by such nice organizations as the Communist Party in Russia and the Kmer Rouge, would be totally out of fashion. Not so, it seems. A pastor, out of all people, wants to start a new trend: burning videogames.
Pastor Richard Patrick, who is serving at the Abyssinia Baptist Church in Newport News, Virginia, is preaching in a troubled place, where crime is on the rise, shootings happen almost daily and youngsters are drawn into all types of illegal activities. He hopes to change all that by organizing marches against violence, by creating a gun buyback program and a Bible to Basketball program. And he is also thinking of burning videogames and rap CDs.
This is how he explains his initiative: "We are considering having something similar to a rally where parents and children can bring CDs and video games that they consider are destructive to the mind set of our youth and have a burning, just like they had a gun buyback last year."
He goes on to say that "Young people are being influenced by what they see and what they hear. They are being influenced by television... television and videos are telling young people a vision but something that's not reality."
So, guns get a buyback program while videogames and rap get a burn program. Because it's obvious to all that guns are far less dangerous to young people than videogame disks and rap albums. Please excuse the generous use of sarcasm.
Such extremist manifestations from respected community leaders are only obscuring the truth that videogames are rarely, if ever, a cause for crime and that they often provide a very effective way of letting out Steam. Maybe the Entertainment Software Association should create a public information program based on the above statement so that we're sure nobody comes up with the idea of burning videogames again.