The Morrison Family

I’m not sure if anyone is aware that I’ve been leaning towards giving Barack Obama my vote come this November, primarily on his stance towards the war and also based on his seemingly genuine desire to change the political tone in this country. Granted, this could just be the marketing talking, but I’d like to believe that someone has the ability to actually stand for something in the highest office in the country.

  That being said, he’s recently been saying some disparaging comments towards those of us who enjoy that newfangled device caled the “videogame”. Gamepolitics has an excellent article explaining how Obama has been using playing videogames as a metaphor for underachievement. Frankly I’m somewhat tired of people who ‘just don’t get it” (the minority of people in the country at the moment..) being seemingly concentrated in positions of power. Perhaps it’s an age thing, and this will become moot in fifteen to twenty years when our generation holds a majority of the seats in our government, but since we live in the “now”, I felt it was time to exercise a little citizenship participation. I went to Obamas website and posted this comment, in the inexplicably difficult to find feedback section. 

  “I came here with the desire to contact you about one thing, but immediately noticed something of a higher priority. The fact that you have this feedback page buried 3 layers in and relatively hard to find seems to be problematic for someone running to be the leader of a representative democracy. I’d get the feedback/comments page on the front page and make it at least look like feedback from your constituents is as important as raising money. (As it should be, although in reality probably isn’t. Don’t worry, I’m currently planning on voting for you, so this isn’t that kind of rant..)

  I wanted to give you some feedback on your position towards “Video Games” being a problem for our youth, and that people shouldn’t be wasting their time with them. Surely, you’re of a generation that should recognize that these types of devices (games, TV, etc) are allowed to become problems because of lax parenting, not because of their inherent problematic nature. If the majority of kids were actually as excited about reading books as they were playing games and watching TV, and spent all their time sitting on the couch reading, we (as parents) would still have to take the initiative to kick them off the couch and make sure their life has a good balance of activities.

  Please don’t venture too far down that well traveled path of ignorant politicians trying to villify videogames merely because they don’t understand why they’re the dominant form of entertainment in this day and age. If not, please take an equal measure of your time to disparage the nikelodeon, the record player, movies, the radio, television, walkmans/ipods, rock/rap music, the jitterbug, and Elvis Presly’s swaying hips for corrupting our youth; in the tradition of previous politicians looking for an easy cultual scapegoat.

  Perhaps if we focus more on the responsibility of parents to be more involved with their children it would solve the problems that come from this obvious disconnect. “

If you’re interested in giving Obama feedback, here’s a handy link to make your life easier. Also note that I haven’t mentioned the other candidates’ stance on video gaming simply because I don’t believe they’re going to be elected in November, but they have some pretty bad track records to date.

 (Update, here’s a great link I received from my friend Tom with some excellent factual information on the differences between the Democratic candidates using the cold, hard data of the bills that they’ve authored and how they’ve fared. I found it to be an excellent and well reasoned read. If you’re fence-sittong on Obama and Hillary, here’s a great source of data to compare the two.)