Accurate appraisal. I was in McD's the other day and the kids came in and went right to the video machines, letting their french fries get cold. Parents had to eat the cold french fries because the kids were too enamored by the machines.

Frankly, not having more and more fishermen and women is............. great!!!! I go fishing in my state and do not run into many others. I can go fishing in the mountains in the middle of the week and it is just me, the trees, the fish. Stay home everyone and let me enjoy what Mother Nature has provided. Thank you.

I love my computer, and the access it gives me to vast cyber archives of information. However, the unfortunate tendency of Americans being sucked into their computer world seems to be generating a sort of insanity. If the "virtual world" is just an algorithm, a computer simulation of the "real world", such people get more and more distanced from reality. That's why I call it a creeping insanity, loss of contact with reality. The virtual avatars that many people are adopting is just the most extreme example of our computer-obsessed society.
And it cannot give the humanizing experience of a kid lifting a rock, and picking up from under it the first roly-poly they've ever seen. Such children gain a compassion for others, human and non-human alike, and a joy in the Creation of which they are a part. This lack of contact with nature is a spiritual crisis.

It is not surprising that kids are leaving the outdoors. The blame on the computer screen is a red herring though. The problem is that the outdoors has been used to villainize the existence of man in it. SUWA, UEC and other groups are continually telling us we are the cause of destruction of the natural environment. There "sky is falling" rhetoric to prohibit anything but their purist agenda has made it NOT FUN to go outdoors for youth. Roll a rock over to look for bugs? Not in our forest. Two years ago on the Manti a lady ranger got after my kids for playing with rocks in the creek. Since then my kids have no interest in going back to the "look but don't touch" world out there. The current attitude amongst environmental groups is that the outdoors just isn't the place for the inquisitive minds and probing hands of a child.