The kids of America and maybe the world are hooked on video games. They come home from school and sit in front of the boob tube with controls in hand, and learn to murder, race cars, rob banks, sexually assault, or do all sorts of mayhem with ever increasing realism. The gun shots and screams are very realistic as are the visuals. Remember “Pac Man?’ I do. Never had one but I tried it at a friends house once or twice. The little mouth would work its way around the screen eating stuff, as I remember. The advocates will say that it teaches the kids hand-eye coordination, and I am sure it does. I say it also teaches them all sorts of anti-social behavior. But it is what it doesn’t teach them that worries me. It doesn’t teach them physical activity, which kids need just as much as does a baby needing to crawl before walking, or nursing at its mother’s breast. Being a geezer, as I am, when I was a kid, there was no TV. Only radio, which I loved then and still do, but not as a 24 hour juke box. I have thousands of hours of old radio shows on tape and disc and love them to death. Radio taught imagination, because your mind’s eye always pictured what was going on, whereas the boob tube shows it all, and leaves nothing to the imagination.
Kids need exercise. They need to play tag, dodge ball, or hide and seek. They need to run and wrestle with each other. They need to play baseball and soccer after school, and not sit in front of a flickering screen, trying to escape the clutches of some TV weirdo, or trying to crash a car into another. They need to be physically fit, and they aren’t. Their minds need to concentrate on reading, writing, and arithmetic, rather than hand-eye coordination. They’ll have plenty of that with computers.