Dear LPG, 

I often take a look at some of the older articles that are posted on your pages and I recently read one that got me thinking. I read what JC   wrote about the fact that youngsters appear to be glorifying war and violence again even though most of them have never actually experienced it.

I have teenaged grandchildren who, every now and then have tried to teach me how to play some of the computer games that they enjoy. I am never going to get the hang of any of them but so many of them are all about fighting.  In his attempt to get me up to speed when I visited recently, my 19-year-old grandson tried to teach me the basics of how to play one such game where he walks around what looks like a virtual battle field hiding behind this and that until he can shoot the bad guy.

There are a lot of games out there but the thing that worries me is that the internet tells that some 90% of them are based on some sort of violent backdrop, and parents can only keep them away from their children for so long.  The producers of these games only make them because they sell which leaves me with the frightening fact in my head that a very big proportion of our young people see war as glamorous and adventurous.

The people in the games only stay dead until they start the game again and the characters that die in the films are played by actors who will be starring in another film in a couple of months’ time.  This has to somehow help them to see life as less sacred.  

Perhaps it is only like that to so many because they have never really experienced it.  JC is right when she says that we oldies are now at an age where there are so few of us who will actually remember what living during war was like unless we have worked in the armed forces.

 
It is no wonder that so many people find it difficult to stand for two minutes a year to remember how wars have influenced our freedoms, let alone the people who were lost in them, because most of them only know what is in the history books and they are more likely to know what the books and films which dramatized it communicated while the reality that we see on the news gets somewhat blurred in with those games. 

Could it be that what is going on in the Ukraine, for so many youngsters, represents something happening somewhere in another part of the world and that they see war as just a story mentioned on the news every now and then?  

Perhaps it is just one of those many vicious circles life throws at us; when there was war all we wanted was peace but the irony of it all is now that we have lived in relative peace for so long, too many people want a bit of violence in their lives again.

PP, Lee 

PP shares some internet facts…

(►►►)