CARLTON FLETCHER: Give Pokemon players a break; they’re having fun

We’re off to find the hero of the day.

— Metallica

The Squawker asked the question — albeit indelicately — that many of us who’ve been paying attention have been asking among ourselves for the last little while: Are these people out trying to catch Pokemons crazy or what?

Actually, most of us haven’t asked about the sanity of the Pokemon GO players, we’ve simply wondered maybe what the attraction is. (Of course, most of those of us pondering this mystery are people who long for the days when you had to dial a telephone — waiting interminably for each number to spin around, hating the 9s and 0s — and you could only talk on one as far away from the base as the cord would stretch.)

Rather than wondering about the obsessive attraction to the latest passing fad, though, maybe we should be a little kinder. It wasn’t that long ago, if we’ll be honest, that adults were wondering about our sanity, about our obsession with Dungeons and Dragons, Donkey Kong (the best, always), pet rocks, Slinkys, Tinker Toys, Easy Bake Ovens, GI Joes, mumblety peg, Furbys, Tickle-Me Elmo, Pick-Up Sticks, Legos, hula-hoops, Chinese jump rope …

Fads are, by definition, passing crazes, but they’re by no means anything new. We’ve all taken part in stuffing phone booths, putting baseball cards in our bike spokes, wearing leisure suits and platform shoes. We’ve done the Charleston, tried our hand at disco, moon-walked poorly, gotten perms, swallowed goldfish, worn “Vote for Pedro” T-shirts, put those ridiculously loud mufflers, undercarriage lights and raccoon tails on our cars.

Even though few of us have the actual capacity for heroism, the overwhelming majority of us want to be heroes. We want reporters to ask us questions; we want our pictures taken. We dream of hitting the winning shot at the buzzer, driving in the winning run in the bottom of the ninth. We want to pull the baby out of the burning building, foil the robbery, talk some distraught person off a ledge.

Truth is, though, except for exceptional circumstances, most of us just aren’t heroic (except in our kids’ eyes, maybe, and don’t discount how cool that is … they’ll figure it out soon enough). We’re not made of the stuff that propels us to run toward burning buildings while everyone else is running away. We generally wilt when people are actually shooting in our direction, and we’d rather sit on a couch (or play Pokemon GO) than go out in 98-degree heat and work on our shot or run pass routes.

(It was Malcolm Gladwell — and Macklemore — who told us that, even with God-given talent, it still takes a minimum of 10,000 hours of work on a given skill to become more than average in that skill.)

Since we’re never going to solve the world’s great murder mysteries, write the great American novel (sigh), find a cure for any devastating disease, write or sing a Grammy-winning song, become the first man or woman on Mars, or find a solution for that pesky global warming issue (Oh, wait, is that still a thing since the Republicans are about to rule the world and a lot of them said it didn’t exist?) … Why is it so bad that some among us take particular pleasure in a excelling at a game? Or answering the most “Jeopardy!” questions?

Why should we ridicule someone who is having a little harmless fun? Why can’t we find it in ourselves to compare the fads of today — no matter how little we understand them — to the silly things we did when we were younger and allow different generations their fun?

Heroism, it should be noted, comes in varying degrees. How many Squirtles do you think Neil Armstrong or Jonas Salk could have captured?

Email Carlton Fletcher at [email protected]. Follow @ABH_Fletcher on Twitter.