Dancing On The Graves Of Reality

From the "this must be the end of civilization" department comes news of cell phone nuts exceeding even their definition of bad taste. Officials at the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. and Poland's Auschwitz Memorial are asking 'Pokemon Go' creator Niantic to take their  game sites off the locations where players can hunt cartoon creatures in the latest idiotic, trendy reality app Pokemon Go, saying it dishonors Holocaust victims. I am not kidding. They are playing a game on their phones while on the grounds of memorials to millions slaughtered because of their religion.

It's another case of society escaping into cell phones and believing that reality lies there rather than what they see before themselves off line. My limited understanding of cell phone games gives me only this understanding, that players in the Pokemon Go game try to capture digital Pokemon characters, which appear hovering over the player's real world surroundings. Sort of merging the real environment with the virtual. Well, at least the cell nuts acknowledge there is a non virtual reality. That's an improvement.

Since Pokemon Go first appeared it has given cell phone nuts a new place to hide from reality. More adults (I think they can be called adults?) Pokemon Go has more users than does other trendy apps like Instagram and Snapchat. But playing a cell phone game while on the grounds of a concentration camp like Auschwitz is not just disrespectful to the dead, but also pathological.  Both memorial sites have Niantic Labs to stop allowing Pokemon Go to use its site in the game. That they would even have to do so is sick. But then cell phones and other electronic devices are making many of us into social degenerates.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of The Simon Wiesenthal Center, said while he recognizes the potential for good virtual reality may bring, playing games on phones while in the museum is outrageous impudence. "This can't be another chapter, it can't be another scavenger hunt. That's a desecration of the memory of the victims and it's a cheapening of the history," Cooper said of using the Holocaust Memorial Museum for gaming. But can a cell addict understand that? I doubt many can because their entirety is centered around amusing themselves with their gadgets.

Dancing on the graves of those victims of mass murder. Now that's a reality I'll never understand.