Priorities

This is a very sad story about a little boy going blind. And yet, I can't help but pause at a certain passage of the article, which I will quote here:

"Die, everybody, die!" he said, jerking back and forth with control box in hand as he timed leaps and disposed of marauding opponents in a Star Wars video game one evening.

He stood at a slant next to a low-slung TV, his face barely a foot from the 55-inch screen, moving right to left to keep the action within his limited frame of reference.

Then, a more challenging game scenario emerged. "This is the part I really don't like," he said. "I get attacked by all these guys."

Said his father, Adam Thibodeaux of Addison: "We try to let him play. Because someday."

He looks away, unable to finish the sentence.

You always hear the old bromide, "No one ever wished on his death bed he had spent more time at the office." Do you think many people who have gone blind say, "Man, I wished I had played more video games when I could see them?"

All the things he could be seeing instead -- art, nature, what have you -- and instead he's standing a foot away from a TV screen slicing through pixelated storm troopers. Yeah, he said he wanted to see a giant redwood tree and the Statue of Liberty -- but the top of his list is a water park and only because it bears a name referenced in a cartoon episode that has nothing to do with it? Does there come a point where you say, "Fine, this is what you say you want, but you're eight, and in this case, we're going to spend our time and money on something you'll appreciate more later in life?" "When you're forty, you'd rather have memories of mountains and sunsets and things of great beauty than of lightsabres and Jedi on a flat screen?"

Heck, I could make a decent argument for watching the original Star Wars trilogy rather than spend what sighted days he has left playing video games.

Read more: http://www.star-telegram.com/2011/03/26/2951702/texas-boy-going-blind-remains.html#ixzz1InkOMOhO