Once upon a time, I was a young man in college spending summers in Kansas City where my parents moved. During my first summer there, I wandered into a nearby game store and met a guy who became my good friend until he passed away from cancer about a decade ago.
He wasn’t a particularly good businessman. He broke even on the store, pulling most of his cash flow from the gamers in back buying from his Coke machine. One of the challenges he had was from the local churches protesting his store and the evils of Dungeons and Dragons.
Having grown up in Wisconsin, I wasn’t used to Bible Belt Christianity and religious right. It was my first real taste of tunnel vision that had no possibility of compromise. It was my first real experience with self-righteousness.
Having played the game, and others guilty by association, I know how evil role playing games are. They are as evil as the people playing them—no more, no less. These folks weren’t interested in understanding; they were interested only in throwing their weight around.
I see this kind of self-righteousness all the time, now. It’s all over politics. It’s in the Westboro Baptists protesting soldiers’ funerals. It’s all over the criminals occupying a nature preserve. It permeates the anti-science attitude that’s pervasive in the United States.
No doubt this kind of self-righteousness has been around since the beginning of civilization, but it’s certainly tiresome. The only way to combat the self-righteousness is education. Educating young people to be tolerant and think for themselves rather than believe what they’re told to think.
Unfortunately, the self-righteous are doing the same thing.
