The book Flags Of Our Fathers, by James Bradley and Ron Powers was published in 2001, and now makes it to the big screen courtesy of 76-year-old director Clint Eastwood.

You’ve seen them plastered all over the net; in concert with yesterday’s post I found another internet treat addressing this very same issue with some salient comments intermixed.

If you are in your 40s and 50s, considering today’s pampered and coddled children never allowed to fail, don’t you wonder how you managed to survive your childhood?

Yeah, me neither.

Consider:

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us.

They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn’t get tested for diabetes.

Then after that trauma, our cribs were painted with lead-based paints.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our pushbikes, we had no helmets, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking.

As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.

Riding in the back of a pick-up on a warm day was a special treat.

We drank water from the garden hoses and NOT from a bottle.

We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle, and no one died from this.

We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank soft drink with sugar in it, but we weren’t overweight because WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING.

We would leave home in the morning, play all day and, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on, despite no one being able to reach us all day, we were fine.

We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times,we learned to solve the problem.

We did not have Playstations, Nintendo’s, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 399 channels on cable, no videotaped movies, no surround sound, no cell phones, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms — we had friends, and we went outside and found them.

I bought green plastic soldiers and made wars all over the back yard; headquarters was a cardboard box. The grass was the ocean. I was popular because I had all the Tonka and Matchbox and Dinky cars and trucks.

Myself and the local kids would go down to the Metropolitan Army Navy store at the corner of Fair Oaks and Marconi on our bikes, buy our green helmet liners, web belts, canteens, shovels, ammo pouches, boots, and then ride to Ancil Hoffman park with our plastic handguns and plastic rifles and shoot the crap out of each other, roll down hills, clutch our chests, then argue over who was dead and who wasn’t, who got shot and who didn’t.

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents.

If one mother said one thing, it was like our own mother said it. We knew when we were in trouble. We knew the moment it happened one mother was telephoning the other — and we were in the Doghouse.

We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, paste from the jar, and no one died.

We were given catapults for our 10th birthdays, made up games with sticks and tennis balls and although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes.

All the kids in the neighborhood couldn’t wait for late winter, when we could pull up the long green weeds in the field behind our houses and have dirt clod wars.

We rode bikes or walked to a friend’s house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just walked in and talked to them.

We built go karts out of Briggs & Stratton engines, and mini-bikes out of the same engines. Pat Green and I built a mini-bike with an engine that had no brakes but we could disengage the clutch; we used our feet to stop.

Our school teams had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn’t had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that.

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law.

This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever.

The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.

We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all.

• Failure is normal; success is the exception.
• Then came the government;
• Then came regulations;
• Then came the hordes of attorneys;
• Then came the lawsuits;
• Then came the “educators;”

And I would posit: what have we created? Are our children better for all of this, are they better equipped to take on a world economy and world competition?

Many of you are parents: I’d like your answer.

BZ

Thank God that, despite these tumultuous times when up is down, white is black, wrong is right, there are still some educators in these United States with an amount of common sense, perspective and proportion.

And despite it being Teddy’s state, Massachusetts has clearly set itself to take the lead in terms of childrens’ safety:

An elementary school south of Boston has outlawed traditional recess chase games such as tag because they’re deemed too rough for kids.

Concerned educators at Willett Elementary School in Attleboro, Mass., are trying to quash unsupervised contact games on the playground out of fear that injured children could hold the school liable.

The risk of children running into each other prompted principal Gaylene Heppe to approve the tag ban, calling recess “a time when accidents can happen.”

Let us be thankful for principals such as Geylene Heppe, having the mandate from parents and her surrounding community to consider the overall welfare of the children who, left unto themselves, would proceed with such over-the-top games such as Tag itself, and possibly others as heinous as Whip The Line, Four Square, Tetherball and (gulp!) Hopscotch.

This would also be an overarching point to consider, luckily having been addressed in Fornicalia:

In 2002, a Santa Monica school banned unsupervised tag because officials felt it not only led to physical injuries, but could also create emotional injuries and self-esteem problems for the weaker or slower kids.

With luck, saving our childrens’ sensitive egos can only be a growing national trend.

THE FALLOUT FROM THIS TREND:

Now back to reality; after all, you didn’t think I’d bite on this tripe, did you?

What is next for American children? Shall we raise them in the humid loam of basements with dark lights like mushrooms? Then they’ll not come in contact with much of anything — but certainly they won’t be injured.

We’ve managed to eliminate Dodgeball. We’ve now eliminated Tag from many schools. There are even, if you can believe it, new schools extant and under construction which do NOT contain any playgrounds whatsoever. Parents are asking: when do you build the playgrounds? Answer from the contractor and the school district admin staff: never.

Are we insane? Have we lost our minds? Do we have any concept whatsoever as to what we are doing to our upcoming generations?

All in the name of that Money Monster called “liability” and, to a lesser degree, “esteem.”

But money will win over esteem any day.

And I submit this: it’s all about the vaginification and pussification of our current generation of little boys. Many educators, most of them women, will not be happy or satisfied until little boys become precisely like little girls: quiet, verbal, demure, obedient, inactive.

Which is why little boys are being medicated at a higher rate than at any other time in our history, by Ritalin and other drugs, why ADD is a “rampant epidemic.”

Little boys don’t need Ritalin; ADD isn’t an “epidemic.” We just have a staff of “educators,” mostly women, who don’t have the patience or the inclination to deal with the base nature of boys. And these “educators” will not be happy until little boys have been completely feminized.

Little boys NEED recess. They NEED contact and running and yelling and movement. It is the very nature of The Beast. It was my nature. It was the nature of anyone raised in the late 1950s and 1960s.

We were told by both our mothers and our fathers: shake it off. Stop that crying. Get up and walk it off. And we did.

Recess and games and active play are mandatory for little boys. I can remember coming back from recess, in elementary school, dripping with sweat. Educators then were smart enough to realize that little boys and, to an extent, little girls needed to vent all that pent-up anxious blood. We were kids; it’s what we all needed.

And now, at a time when Esteem rules all, inactive children are more obese than ever, PE classes have been eliminated, and the outlets for the venting of little boys have been all but eliminated — well, is it any wonder that little boys are finding themselves medicated in public schools more and more? And it won’t stop at this point; it will only become worse.

But even more than that, let’s do what I call the Logical Extension:

What kind of generations are we raising? How well are we preparing them for the Reality of not only these United States, but the realities of the World, a World Economy, and those assholes who would do us national harm simply because we are successful?

Whilst the Islamists become stronger, more determined, we are raising and encouraging generations to become weaker, more medicated, fatter, more inactive, less willing to engage in challenging thought: little whining, complaining male pussies.

I think this mother sums it all up:

Celeste D’Elia, a Willett Elementary School parent, said her son feels safer because of the new rule against tag. “I’ve witnessed enough near collisions,” she said.

Oooh. How bad! “Near collisions”??!!?

Give me a fucking break.

BZ

BZ

There is rampant corruption in American politics.

And clearly there are problems with money and politicians — with both the Dems and the GOP. The corruption is endemic on both sides of the aisle and no one party can claim it’s impervious to the corruptive forces of cash or cash and lobbyists.

There are two types of corruption: there is moral corruption and there is financial corruption. Despite the FACT that Foley committed no crime (unlike Democratic Senator Gerry Studds) he is excoriated in the DEM press and is the Devil incarnate — and has been for weeks, I might add.

On the other hand, following his passing on October 14th, former House Democratic leader Gerry Studds was lionized in his New York Times obituary as a “Gay Pioneer.” Equitable, do you think?

Studds was censured in 1983 for having sex with a 17-year-old male congressional intern. His act was overt and illegal. Studd’s himself called the act a “very serious error in judgment.”

Foley’s act was with text messages to a former page over 18 — scummy, inappropriate and clearly wrong in any case — but Foley did not have sex with him, consensual or otherwise. With the name Foley I see the linked adjective “disgraced.” I did not then nor now see that word associated with Studds.

Both the acts on Studds’s and Foley’s part were horribly wrong; Foley may be but Studds was a sexual predator. But you already know my point.

Moral corruption aside, another current point purposely underplayed by the DEM are the fiscally-corruptive issues of Democrat Harry Reid –regarding properties and Christmas bonuses. A screaming silence here.

But all is not lost for I have two solutions; the first is simple, expeditious and can be backed with a second suggestion which will mandate (and here’s why the DEM won’t go for it) that the Mainstream Media “put up or shut up.”

First:

Limit all campaign contributions to no more that $100. Period. End of statement. No contributions can be accepted from corporations. Individual living persons only. If you truly do have a “mandate from the people” then the people shall speak with their individual pocketbooks and their votes.

Second:

The Mainstream Media will provide, for television, airtime on their channels for individual candidates’ political statments and debates; this airtime will be credited towards television’s federal PSA (Public Service Announcement) licensed mandate. For the print media, they shall provide column inches, as another public service to the country and community, for same.

You, of course, realize that neither shall happen. Just wistful thinking.

But wouldn’t it be wonderful? And wouldn’t it solve an entire host of issues?

Heavy sigh.

BZ