Here We Go Again

              So, there I was, yet another young black man who had fallen victim to the gang culture of early nineties South Central San Andreas. My Christian name was Carl, but I was known on the streets and among my gang as CJ. I had been brought into this life by factors and influences that seemed out of my control at the time. But by the grace of God I had escaped that death trap of an existence that I was once caught inside. However, my new life suffered a massive blow when I found out that my mother had been murdered. She had been killed in what they were calling “a gang related shooting”, and I knew that this was a direct repercussion of my running away from home with so many things left unfinished. But no longer, I swore that I would get my ass back to San Andreas, avenge my mother, and clean up the mess I left behind. Before I could even get out of the car, I felt myself devolving right back into the same gang banger I thought I had left behind. I was boosting cars, I was murdering any mother fucker in the wrong color, I was senselessly  and mercilessly gunning down people on the streets , I was killing cops like it was my damn job, and most importantly I was getting fucking paid. In between all this brutality and bloodshed, I somehow found plenty of time to run a drug empire, be a ruthless pimp, and reclaim my spot as the OG of my neighborhood. Now, you may think that living a life as violent and reckless as I did may have worn heavy on my conscience, but to your dismay, it doesn’t even phase me one bit. And that’s primarily because I did all those things not as a young black man in San Andreas (which is the entirely fictional setting of a Grand Theft Auto video game ), but as a twelve year old white boy in Colorado Springs, Colorado. I committed all these atrocities digitally, in my friend Nate’s living room, through a Playstation 2 controller, and most likely with Cheeto dust on my fingers.  

            

I am a product of violent video games. I grew up playing some of the most ultra-violent video games the world has ever known. From a young age, I witnessed the ruthlessly graphic finishing moves in Mortal Kombat at the end of each fight. I remember playing a samurai game called Shinobi, that was a just a brutal gore fest of chopping other samurai to bits as you saved the world. I played every single grand theft auto game, I had notebooks filled with cheat codes that would make these games even more sinister at my own volition. I played them all growing up, and never, not one damn time, did I feel compelled by those games, those works of fiction, to go out and murder because I had lost my ability differentiate between reality and fiction. It’s just downright fucking absurd to say that video games have the level of influence required to create a mass murderer from nothing.   

              We love nothing more than to blame the inanimate. And why not? It’s so much easier than to grasp onto the tangible evidence of our shortcomings. Modern day America is the poster child for depravity and degradation, and we seem to be in a perpetual state of ignorance to this fact. We are a country that has become drastically more violent for decades, and instead of figuring out what in the actual fuck is causing our fellow man to continue to murder in cold blood, we have launched multiple campaigns advocating the damnation of objects. Congratulations American politicians and self-righteous soccer moms alike, for making such a profound fucking impact on the world and the safety of its people. We have put the blame on everything from cap guns to hip hop, as potential reasoning for why children are growing up to commit such putrid acts of hate. But all this is for not, because the reason is us. The prevalence of violence on video games, movies, and TV’s is just a direct response to our society. The games are only getting more violent because the consumers thirst for those senseless video games has only gotten stronger, because they need it, they crave it, they know nothing else. They have already been desensitized by real violence for most of their lives. So, what is a video game compared to the real thing? After all, these are the kids that grew up around television sets that were constantly exposing them to footage of the attacks on September 11^th, the active combat zones in Afghanistan and Iraq, police shootings, and countless school shootings. All of these examples of such prevalent violent factors weighing on young, developing psyches, and you want to say that it’s a video game that has caused these young people to have massive mental breakdowns that result in murderous outbursts? Seems a lot like people ignoring mental health problems because they’re the big scary monster that we like to pretend doesn’t exist. 

              It just seems so fucking audacious to claim that a sequence of moving pictures, covering a narrative and following a story, could really drive someone to a dark enough place to take the life of another human being for no reason whatsoever. That place is vile, that place is void of redemption, and that place is dug into deeper and deeper over the years. Years of being berated, abused, and violated by every medium life has to offer.

Just imagine a life where your only association with the rest of humanity has been persistently negative. You were ridiculed and bullied as a child and into early adulthood, shown nothing but disgust and rejection by the opposite sex, and most likely you’ve been horribly abused by someone you once trusted. As a result, your mind wanders to some pretty dark places and you begin to welcome ideas of vindication through violence. You know that these ideas are wrong, so you seek help. You are asked some generic questions about what people your age are supposed to be feeling and based on your answers, you’re given pills for an anxiety disorder. But the pills only change your perception and put a spin on reality, they don’t do anything to change how people treat you, and now you’re in the same rut as before except now you have some really neat little chemicals swimming around your brain. So, there you are confused as to why you even sought help in the first place. That feeling is called hopeless. That is when your final slip into madness begins. That is when you put your guard down and let those vengeful thoughts encompass your mind. You’ve written your manifesto, you’ve researched military tactics online, you’ve bought all the necessary equipment to carry a proper load of ammunition and supplies, you’ve got yourself a firearm, and most importantly, you’re out of your fucking mind and ready to become a killing machine. After you commit your massacre, and you are undoubtedly killed (either by your own doing, or you got plugged full of holes by law enforcement), rest assured that nothing will change, and your death will have been in vain. See, despite your overwhelming background and history with terrible circumstance, that has been proven over and over to be the building blocks for violent behavior, your face will be on the news next to a picture of some camouflage clad, assault rifle toting, militant looking mother fucker, all because the FBI found a copy of Call of Duty in your Xbox. Then parents with children that have symptoms just like yours, won’t have to face the fact that they have a  potential monster on their hands, and they can just ground him from video games instead of dealing with his demons.

 As long as we keep objectifying these acts of violence, resolution and peace will remain nothing more than fallacies.