Some things aren't funny

By Hannah Hayes
April 29, 2008

The thud of soldiers’ footsteps came from behind. Sounds of gunshots battered off the walls. The cries of defeat rang in the air.

No, this isn’t the Middle East. This is Mark Twain Hall.

One floor holds many rooms with doors flung open to display boys’ faces lit up by the glow of their TV screens. They grip their weapons — their “controllers” — in earnest, and fire away at their virtual insurgency.

This isn’t about violence. This isn’t an issue of censorship. But when this eerie scene of people spending their afternoon recreation in virtual combat plays out every day, it seems there might be something wrong here.

It’s difficult to watch “Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare,” a video game that obviously mimics the war in Iraq, and not think there is something wrong with “playing” in a consequences-free version of such a horrific conflict.

Then there is the world outside my dorm that baffles to the same degree.

Why, when guiltless women and children in Texas are being ripped apart by a broken social system, would we rather write about their hair and prairie dresses as if they were animals in a zoo?

And forgive me, but I don’t understand why Harold and Kumar are escaping from Guantanamo Bay.

You could excuse all of this with claims of satire, curiosity or free speech, but it’s disconcerting to plead the first amendment over a film depicting a place where no such idea exists.

Where it starts or where it ends is unclear, but this idea of “us and them” is everywhere. It has gripped our daily life, our country and our world so much so that no one seems to notice it in the games we play.

It is the inability to let go of one’s pride, notions or ignorance and begin to understand another view that makes it seem okay to turn a soldier’s awful reality into a game or let extremist views make us compassionless toward a group of people who need our help.

Nothing I’ve said is complex or novel. But why does it seem there are examples at every turn to show how little the United States thinks of anyone who doesn’t share our “ideals”? Or how little we think about reality?

America’s biggest import is delusion.

We turn everything into a joke or a game, satire or a matter of defense, so we needn’t experience anything too intensely. So critical thinking is only something you employ in English class.

This is not cops and robbers. This is not the Vietnam War being broadcast for the first time. We have entered another level.

The further we find ourselves having to question the cost at which our country’s greatness came and what our actions mean on a global scale, the further we bury ourselves in fantasy world, in our defensive measure.

We are now in the midst of what might be the most important time the world will know. It is imperative that not only the U.S., but also the entire global community come together to face detrimental crises or face our own destruction. Yet here we still sit, like a child, too proud to admit that we don’t know it all.

Lets not let thinking or empathy be the cost of pride.

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Some things aren't funny

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