Today's society has gotten to be such a "wimpish" existence. I hear all the time on how horrible the Iraqi conflict is. I don't agree with it in the least and I sure don't like seeing Americans dying for nothing, but my point is a few soldiers are killed in a conflict and society has a conniption. In past wars, a few soldiers dying was nothing, compared to the thousands that were killed. I can't imagine how society would react if there was a battle like Gettysburg where tens of thousands were killed in a few days.
It's called "civilizing." The essence of civilization is people learning to live harmoniously and cooperatively with strangers, in order to enjoy the surplus that division of labor and economy of scale produce, so that our lives are no longer obsessed with survival and subsistence. As the size of our communities increased steadily over the past 12,000 years since we stopped living as nomadic extended family groups, we've had to learn to make peace with ever-stranger "strangers." Not just people we don't know personally, but people who speak another language, then people who look different, then people who worship different gods, then people who follow different economic and political systems, and ultimately people on the other side of the planet who are mere abstractions to us until their less enlightened leaders force them to emigrate from dysfunctional nations and their children show up in our children's school.
The pace of the "transcendence" of our civilizing project accelerated since the invention of fossil-fuel-burning transportation and electronic communication forced a quantum expansion of the size of our communities. Since the end of WWII--the death rattle of the Industrial Era and the birth scream of the Information Age--the number of people killed by warfare and other violent acts by governments and other groups rather than by individuals has been falling steadily.
Today we can be outraged by the death toll in Darfur, or even in Iraq, precisely
because no battles have approached the scope of Gettysburg or Normandie, no slaugthers have taken place on the scale of Hiroshima or Auschwitz--within the memory of anyone younger than me. More citizens of the Western nations are killed by drunk drivers than by deliberate violence. Our standards have changed; we expect more from each other. China's Mao and Zimbabwe's Mugabe are categorized with Hitler and Stalin--not because they killed huge numbers of people with explosive weapons and other modern technology, but merely because they orchestrated the collapse of civilization in their countries and huge numbers of people died from starvation, disease and other causes that have been under control since the Stone Age.
You kids should be grateful that you have the luxury of weeping over a war that kills only a few hundred of
your people in a year. And perhaps shed a few more tears over the much greater death toll of
their people, which is still three orders of magnitude smaller than that of WWII. If you're looking for something to be outraged about, how about those 20,000 Americans who are killed by drunk drivers every year? We all know who those drivers are, and they're not even required to take their shoes off before boarding their vehicles.
Another thing I see is how children are being raised. My God, some of the crap parents yell about is pathetic. One instance is where a lot of schools are now banning games such as dodge ball and swings because kids have gotten hurt. Big deal! We got hurt growing up. The wound healed and we went on. It is so pathetic that it is laughable. I'll probably live just past the mid-part of this century and I can't imagine what those generations are going to be like.
Geeze dude, you're way too young to sound like my mother fifty years ago. "What are the schools coming to? They're teaching kids how to 'get along' instead of the skills you'll need when you become a clerk-typist or an assembly-line worker or a switchboard operator."
Life has become more precious and people consider no life more precious than that of a child. Kids grow up with virtually zero chance of being killed by polio, tuberculosis, food poisoning, and other causes of massive grief around the time of my birth. We've even made great inroads against drunk driving and other traffic deaths with seat belts and air bags. So parents go a step further. They cocoon their babies in strollers that are miniature Volvos, they put helmets on their heads when they ride their training-wheel bikes, and they hogtie them into the back seats of their cars. Playground injuries and sports deaths have become major concerns due to the attrition of more serious concerns, so they're looking for ways to curtail them.
Yes, of course they're overdoing it but it's out of love. Don't be such a crank about it. With our superior intellects and our lofty perspective you and I can see that the results of this overprotection are obese, out-of-shape children who run out and take every risk they can find when they become teenagers. This phenomenon is getting plenty of coverage so it will be corrected within a generation. It's irrational risk analysis. But national leaders who destroyed
Iraq because a bunch of
Saudi Arabians knocked over one of our buildings do not provide good role models for risk analysis and we're struggling to overcome that handicap. Besides, when a majority of the population refuses to accept basic principles of science like evolution, they have a much more serious defect in their cognitive skills than some fairly subtle errors in risk analysis.
