From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Wed Jul 09 2003 - 01:27:46 MDT
Spike writes
> I asked my neighbor who has children, and learned
> that things are a bit different today than the 60s,
> when we were children. Kids today are not allowed
> to thrash, threaten and abuse each other the way they
> did back then. The schools now are much more conscious
> of legal liability should little Johnny come home
> with a bloody nose or broken tooth.
Southern California evidently was not like your Florida.
Four years at one elementary school resulted in, I think,
two fights, neither of which actually landed blows.
> In my own misspent youth, the students were allowed
> (yea encouraged) to beat each other early and often.
> For this would result in their becoming practiced
> and confident fighters.
>
> The notion in those years of peace, love and
> understanding was that this old world would be more
> or less at war constantly until the nuclear holocaust
> ended our strife forever.
Yes, that was the sixties all right.
> Until that time of course there would be a persistent
> need for soldiers, whose fighting skills were honed
> from an early age whether they liked it or not.
My theory is that the newer the school or schools,
(a) the less time cliques have to build up (b)
the less other bad old traditions (like stomping
and shoving people into toilets) have to build up.
> It could be that most kids now go thru their entire
> school years without ever having their heads
> dunked into the toilet, and perhaps without even
> a hazing or beating. Their resulting inability to
> fight is perhaps what is pushing ever more advanced
> mechanization of warfare.
Perhaps, but I think that it is more likely that the
inability to take casualties is what is pushing rich
nations to mechanization. At one solder lost a day,
it will take approximately a hundred years for the
American troops in Iraq to be cut by ten percent, but
the country will not be able to endure such "horrific"
losses for many more months. And Saddam Hussein knows
it, and I guess that this was his strategy all along
when he found they really were going to depose him.
Lee
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