Roughly 15 years ago, I wrote a sports column about a neighborhood recreation complex, one replete with five baseball diamonds that, during daylight, non-school hours went unused — save for a kid on a dirt bike, now and then — unless adult-organized and supervised league games and practices were being conducted.
Many spring, summer and fall afternoons I’d walk our dog to those fields, curious to learn if anyone played on them as a matter of unsupervised, chosen fun. Not once did I see kids — and our neighborhood was loaded with them — playing ball on those fabulous, gates- and arms-open baseball fields.
We never had fields like that, when we were kids, but it didn’t matter. Any field, every day (and all day on weekends) would draw a crowd on bicycles — a bat, ball and mitt in tow. Gee, what the kids in my old neighborhood would have done for even one of those diamonds, let alone five!
So I began to ask the neighborhood kids why, unless their parents hauled them there in their rec-league uniforms, these fields go empty. What did our kids — the boys, anyway — do instead of play ball?
And every kid, with some degree of where-ya-been? surprise, answered, “Video games.”
Sitting in front of TV sets, playing video games, had become their chosen, every-chance-they-can form of recreation, socialization and even exercise. Those five neighborhood baseball fields may as well have been in Khartoum.
Three weeks ago, Gannett’s wire service published an investigative piece that once — and, perhaps, still — would strike reasonable people as too ludicrous to be possible.
It was about tens of thousands of adults — folks in their mid- and late-30s — severely addicted to video games, so much so that treatment centers for alcohol, drug and other addictions, have added treatments for compulsive video gamers.
The testimonies from both the afflicted and the professional counselors were such that if you substituted “crack” or “booze” for video gaming, little would be different: Health, careers, families, marriages and normal socialization are lost to the addiction.
And the need for instant and repetitive gratification is met.
The household I’d help head had its video-game fling. We became amused by the Super Mario Bros., playing it frequently for a couple of months — until the fun faded.
But years earlier, could such a computerized, bells, whistles and gizmos game — and I understand that that Mario Bros. is primitive by today’s video game standards — have replaced my desire to play baseball?
Would I have been so strongly influenced to abandon natural sunlight for a basement TV set? Would my folks have ordered me to play baseball as a punishment?
I don’t know. I’ll never know.
But it seems highly likely that we’ve already lost plenty of academic and athletic greatness to the repetitive stagnation of video games. Advance to the rear!
And it’s just as likely that those losses will soon seem small placed beside what’s coming.
* * *
I understand why local and national news divisions dispatch sympathetic reporters to interview America’s Islamic leaders and spokespersons every time there’s a slight — real or perceived — perpetrated against Muslims living in America. But it only works one way.
How come no one on TV asks why there are no Muslim student protests, here, against, oh, say, the murdering of medical workers trying to immunize Muslim children from polio in Arabic and African-Islamic regions?
The continuing murderers of these ultimate caregivers — many enlightened Muslims — are explained by some Islamists as provoked by a US plot to sterilize Muslims with a serum disguised as a polio vaccine.
And what do American and other Western Islamic leaders and spokespersons think of Egyptian President and Muslim Brotherhood rep Mohamed Morsi’s rant calling Jews “bloodsuckers” and “descedants of pigs and apes”? That stuff’s never asked.
Or would asking such questions seem impolite?