Hope the word "Columbine" is spelled right in this post
Today I read an article on Rense.com (an excellent website for all conspiracy theorists) where a parent was moaning about MTV, and the influence it was having on American children and other children. Apparently, MTV is bad for your morals or something. I wouldn't know, I've been to busy humping to watch it But anyway, to get to my main point, this made me recall a conversation (well, more like a fight actually ) that I had with one of my high-school teachers a few years back. She was a high-ranking teacher - one of the most influential ones on the schoolteacher's board at my school, so that made fighting with her in front of an entire classroom of shocked students even more fun
The day after the Columbine tragedy (don't get me wrong - it was a HORRIBLE, SICKENING tragedy) she told us that she knew who was responsible for the killings. She said that the game Doom, manufactured by iD software, had instructed Klebold and friend to shoot their classmates. Now, this immediately made me stand up out of my seat and say "Oh, right, so if we read War & Peace then go to war because of it, we should blame Tolstoy? Your religion was responsible for the Crusades, which make the Columbine tragedy pale in comparison - and yet you choose to base your entire life and belief system on that?"
Now, this woman was quite mean and very, very nasty - she knew that I was a hardline athiest, and yet she continously dropped comments about God loving me all the time. It's a pity I was forced to take her English classes. What probably pissed her off even more was that no matter how much trouble she gave me and how much she taunted me for being an athiest, I would still turn in essays that she couldn't rightly score less than a B+ for. This probably really rocked her world, that someone as Ghod-forsaken as me could do things like that. She must've thought I was driven by Satan or something LMAO!
So after the above comment, which contained a reference I knew only she would get, since there were really no great Tolstoy fans in the classroom, she went bright red. This woman was NOT used to having her authority challenged in this way, and she had a major ego problem about it, so she then began her spiel, saying how she had seen Doom and all the pentagrams and other Satanic symbolism in the game, and how it was an evil, Satanic game. Needless to say, I started giggling insanely, and she couldn't NOT have heard me, as I was right at the front, all the better to flame her! Asked why I was laughing, I asked her if she had been shown Carmack's head on a stick inside the final boss in the game, and she said no, so then I asked her why she was taking this game so seriously. Her response was that she felt it was a game influenced by Satan, and that it had driven the two murderes in Columbine to do their deeds. Unfortunately for this "beloved" teacher of mine, she hadn't realized that I'd been scouring the Web the night before for more information on the murderers, and had discovered a few things. Here was my response:
"So, ma'am, are you saying that Doom was the exclusive reason behind the killings? The ultimate motivation? The single instigator?"
"Yes, I am. It is a Satanic game, featuring plenty of mindless violence."
"Does the fact the the two killers were widely castigated and derided in their social environment for being nerds/geeks have no bearing? Does the fact that they were both on anti-depressant drugs give you no pause? Do you wish to lay the blame at the foot of a video game which runs at a resolution so low that if a person could see at the same resolution, they would be considered legally blind?"
Of course, I got detention
My main point is, this teacher felt that a silly game could cause people to commit murder. This seems utterly ridiculous to me. From the accounts of the Columbine tragedy, it seems that the game in question, Doom, was certainly not free of guilt - the killers even mentioned the game during their spree. However, what was the primary reason they started shooting up their classmates? Just playing a video game isn't something that's going to make you start shooting people. If this were true, I'd be a mass murderer! And yet, everyone who knows me personally will understand my absolute pacifism - I have guilty feelings about squashing flies, and I will not step on spiders, but will rather pick them up with a piece of paper and put them in the garden. What my teacher and many others have entirely missed is the fact that these two guys were in a social environment that was not friendly to them - it's the good old "jocks vs. nerds" scenario. It is something that personally affected me, and it can lead to incredible stress during the school years. Laying all the blame at the foot of a video game is wrong.
What are the views of the posters here about the influence of contemporary video games, music and television on "the youth"? Was the Youth Book right?