Video Games are the DEVIL!!!

I was a lucky kid growing up in the growing city of Covington Kentucky. I got a lot of things that many kids weren't able to afford. Now my family was rich by any means. My mother was a teacher and my dad worked for an airline catering company. However, with their combined incomes, they were able to provide my brothers and I with many forms of entertainment. Out of all these things we received, the most pronounced would definitely be the variety of video games our parents bought for us. We were proud owners of a Super Nintendo, a PlayStation, GameBoys, a PlayStation 2, and in the modern world today I own an XBOX 360, and my younger brother owns a PlayStation 3. My two brothers and I LOVED video games and our parents didn't mind that we did. We played every sort of game you could think of, from Donkey Kong to the brutality of Mortal Kombat. From NASCAR to the crazy worlds of Grand Theft Auto. These games were incredibly entertaining to us and we could not put them down whenever we had the time to play them. Playing so many video games growing up made it very easy to notice the people who didn't approve of them. "Video games today are too violent!" "Video games will ruin our children's futures!" "If we let our kids play these games, they will gain a false sense of reality and their lives will be worthless!" All of these allegations against video games got me thinking...why didn't my mom stop me before my brain turned to mush?! 

To this day, I play video games regularly. I am a college student-athlete who participates in volunteer work and sometimes charity. I work hard at everything I do and my life is heading in the right direction. the reason my mother didn't stop my brothers and I from enjoying video games was because she wasn't an over-dramatic, ignorant parent like most of the people who oppose video games. She knew I would be able to witness virtual violence in a made up world and KNOW that it wasn't REAL. I was smart enough to control right or wrong in a game and then decide between right or wrong in the real world. In other words, when Rayden tore Scorpion in half and held the severed carcass in his hands in Mortal Kombat, I didn't feel like performing the same task to someone I disliked the next day. In my opinion, either adults need to give children more credit in figuring out right and wrong, or the adults need to get off their asses and do a better job in raising them in the first place. Think about how your raising your damn kids before you blame something else for their ignorance.