News and views from the award-winning author of the novels The Skinny Years, America Libre, House Divided and Pancho Land

Saturday, March 1, 2008

Genocide as harmless fun

I received an email from an Anglo in-law recently with the subject line “The Border Patrol Game” and a message that read: Get Ready—They Are Faaast!!! (This is hilarious!).


I followed the web link in the email and was presented with a game where the player scores points by shooting Mexicans attempting to cross the border. The game offered three types of targets: Mexican Nationalist, Drug Smuggler, and Breeder. The “Breeder” was a pregnant woman with a child and an infant in diapers. When shot, the woman, child, and infant explode in bloody carnage.


After some research, I discovered The Border Patrol Game first surfaced on the web almost two years ago. The game sparked a few local news stories at the time, but created no widespread outrage. Would this game have been dismissed so casually if the targets had been black? How would the public have reacted if these had been little blonde children being gunned down by Islamic terrorists?


That some sick individual would create this kind of game is not surprising. The world has always had racist lunatics capable of any depravity. What is truly frightening is the number of “normal” Americans who are casually amusing themselves by pretending to kill mothers with infants.


I know the person who sent me this game does not consider himself a racist. To him, this was “hilarious,” just harmless fun. And that should worry all of us. Because as a nation, we have reached a point where people are no longer appalled at a game that makes genocide fun.


There is very little hilarious about that.


Raul Ramos y Sanchez