As a Gen Xer, I came up just as the video games started to become popular, but because we lived in the country, and didn’t have the budgets that people seem to have today, we didn’t have the ever-popular Atari game system to absorb our time. Our version of fantasy was acting like soldiers and running through the woods, playing war with anything we could find for to simulate a gun. (The lucky ones had a plastic gun, and unlucky ones got a stick.) We would even put old Army uniforms on to make it as real as possible during our battles.

Recently I was watching my teenage son and his buddy play the popular game Fortnite on his X-Box and it struck me of how every effort has been made, in a game that involves killing the other players, to remove any sense of reality. While other combat-related games like Call of Duty made what seemed like a tedious effort to follow reality in uniforms, gear, and military tactics, this game finds every way to remove reality entirely from the game. Whether it’s firing a rocket-propelled grenade launcher that has a pumpkin head at the end of it at your opponent, repeatedly hitting the walls of a building enough times with a knife and it magically is destroyed, or the endless options the player has to design their character with avatars that look like a cross between a character from the “Outer Limits” to a drag queen superstar.

While there’s no expectation that a video game should mirror real life, the popularity of this game falls within a bigger picture that resembles an overall infatuation with everything “Not Real” in our country, especially involving the younger generations. While we have real problems going on in the world at large that will have life-or-death consequences for many people for years to come, we have generations of Americans now that don’t possess the necessary sense of reality to deal with any of it, or a desire to obtain one. I often wonder how many young people might read that Russia just launched a ballistic nuclear weapon on their Tik Tok account and just keep flipping until they get to the video of the latest YouTube star playing pranks.

Another form of fantasy that threatens young people is identity fantasy. While the most well known of these, of course, is gender fluidity that completely discards scientific and biological fact in favor of a mental and emotional sickness that encourages one to believe that he can change his gender as easily my aunt Martha changed her hair color. While one would think that this craziness would be bad enough for our society, yet another form of identity absurdity can be found with an increasingly popular “furries” identification -- identifying as an animal. This lunacy has resulted in at least one school putting a litter box in a unisex bathroom to accommodate a student who identifies as a cat.

While the U.S. seems to be the epicenter for much of this insanity, it is not the only place that it is happening. The BBC in England just allowed a transgender activist to strip completely naked on live TV and played a piano with his penis, and let the show go on. In Japan, the latest craze is adult men keeping dolls, not just for pleasures of the flesh, but as companions; complete with new outfits each day and walks in the park to sit on the bench together.

There are many reasons for all this, but probably the greatest is the breakdown of the family. While many might attribute gender fluidity to immature and naïve young people who are getting sucked in by an online cult, where is the maturity of their parents who sit idly by making excuses for the situation, under the notion that “This is just a phase, they’ll grow out of,” or “I want to give them their space”? Where are the parents who “Have the feeling” that something is wrong and are taking the easy right instead of the hard left to put their foot down with these young people?

Another culprit in this is the internet itself. While the internet has brought much convenience to our lives, it very quickly is contributing substantially to the failure to grasp reality.

One thing for sure: the battle to bring back reality has just begun, and it will not be easy. Every entity from corporate media to politicians are taking full advantage of the popularity that comes from fantasy and using it to their benefit; children be damned. The reality that comes from gender transition won’t set in for some until the hurt from family members is discovered and the bill from lawsuits arrives for those performing the counseling and the surgeries. Unfortunately, there will probably be very little accountability for those in the media cheering this on. They will simply just move onto another topic.

In the meantime, maybe we can make a video game that deal only with reality. Unfortunately, it would be a pretty short game, since to win, you’d have to turn the damn thing off, put your phone away and start learning a few things that comes from living and experiencing real life.

Image: RawPixel