Linedrive
Game Face Status: On
- Joined
- Feb 8, 2002
- Posts
- 8,793
You can read the article below if you like, but I am more interested in hearing how YOU handle your kids when faced with the world's realities. Do your kids watch the news or rely upon you to convey to them when important events occur...?
Televised psycho-babblers are advising parents to shield their children from grisly truths about the Age of Terrorism. Baloney. Why not expose them to reality?
“Oh, you couldn’t do that!” those self-asserted guardians of rearing the young recoil in shock. “It would scar their psyches for life.”
More baloney.
Where Ignorance and Learning Begin
Which is more harmful to children? Blindfolding them to perils that loom over them in their blissful state of total unpreparedness? Or equipping them to understand the true nature of the threats and be ready to take intelligent part in their own survival?
Those who dare speak up against the current politically correct dogma of smothering children under layers of denial of reality are often accused of not loving those children enough.
Still more baloney.
What Constitutes Real Love?
Which is more loving? Stripping children buck naked of defense mechanisms in an environment of terrorist mayhem and murder addressed to their homeland? Or doing your dead-level best to open their eyes and teach them how best to protect themselves, their families and their nation against that terror?
“But children are too tender to be involved in anything so traumatic to their need for nurturing.”
Baloney yet again.
Consider this nation’s own nurturing.
Facing Frontier Reality
During colonial days before America became a tottering new nation, it was one serious time to be alive – and to remain so.
In tiny cabins beyond the Allegheny and Cumberland mountains were born children surrounded by even-earlier Americans who were prepared to fight to their own and someone else’s death to preserve their ancient tribal lands and heritage.
Those children of pioneer families were assigned roles and given duties to perform, assuming their share of what had to be done to protect those precarious homesteads and precious lives within.
Living Amid Reality
Their parents understood full well the meaning of terror, and they lived their lives and raised their offspring accordingly – awareness and preparedness over ignorance and vulnerability.
Did that produce children scared out of their wits or future adults whose psyches were shredded to the point they were left gibbering idiots cowering under their beds, cursing their parents for not loving them enough?
No, it produced generations of resourceful, determined Americans who had what it took to build a nation despite enormous obstacles.
Reality Was No Secret
During the American Revolution, there was no hiding from children that their patriot parents – mothers and fathers alike – courageously risked being hanged as traitors. That vivid reality was amply evident to young eyes.
During the Civil War, children on either side of the Mason-Dixon Line, white and black, were not spared face-to-face confrontations with what it meant to endure privations and afflictions of a nation torn by the bloodiest of conflicts. They saw their fathers and brothers, missing an arm, without a leg, limping home. Or watched them buried and their mothers and sisters left to fend as best they could.
In World War I, no American child was indulged ignorance of what was happening Over There, including gas attacks in the trenches.
Not for Adults Only
World War II found American children, in classrooms and at home, learning geography and what the Axis powers were doing as they spread like spilled ink across the world map.
They gathered tin cans of accumulated bacon grease for conversion of its glycerin into munitions. They fulfilled those and a multitude of other patriotic duties, some merely symbolic, others critically important, in furtherance of America’s war effort.
There was no conspiracy of silence sheltering those children from what it would mean if America lost that war. They had seen the photos of the Bataan death march, the fall of Paris, the skeletal corpses stacked outside the furnaces.
That Was Then
No one suggested they not view in movie theaters the latest news reels from the European and Pacific fronts. No one switched off the radio when Edward R. Murrow reported, “This is London,” during the blitz of England.
Today, though, it is an altogether different matter.
Parents under persuasion of the coddlers of psyches hastily click family remote channel-changers when news intrudes on mind-numbing, baby-sitting television shows. They conceal from their children the scenes of terrorists crashing airliners laden with passengers and aviation fuel into the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers. Heaven forfend, they might have to explain.
Conversation about what Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are doing to human beings, including little children, is not engaged in their homes.
Let’s Pretend vs. Let’s Get Real
“Violence on television is not good for children,” say the same parents who rush to video stores to purchase for their young the latest thumb games that enable them to inflict nothing but violence upon frenetic virtual characters from whom they are conveniently disassociated electronically.
Such children are considered by their parents as precocious due to their dexterity with machines of make-believe, while the real-life Age of Terrorism roils all about them.
Those are the same parents who, as children themselves, were likely conditioned by politically correct parents to live lives of reality-denial and self-absorption.
Bin Laden’s Deadly Game
An America deadened to the quick by permissive indulgence and personal gratification, cloaked in a cocoon of oblivion as to what’s going on in this world, is just exactly what practitioners of terror are looking for when they head this way. And many parents are playing straight into their hands.
“Like is real! Life is earnest!” wrote Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and he wasn’t kidding.
What possible, authentic benefit is there to be achieved by hiding those venerable truths from the children of America – the children who, if they make it that far, will one day become the next generation of American adults?
Spare not the young the realities of today if they are to be spared the consequences of tomorrow.
- John L. Perry, a prize-winning newspaper editor and writer
Televised psycho-babblers are advising parents to shield their children from grisly truths about the Age of Terrorism. Baloney. Why not expose them to reality?
“Oh, you couldn’t do that!” those self-asserted guardians of rearing the young recoil in shock. “It would scar their psyches for life.”
More baloney.
Where Ignorance and Learning Begin
Which is more harmful to children? Blindfolding them to perils that loom over them in their blissful state of total unpreparedness? Or equipping them to understand the true nature of the threats and be ready to take intelligent part in their own survival?
Those who dare speak up against the current politically correct dogma of smothering children under layers of denial of reality are often accused of not loving those children enough.
Still more baloney.
What Constitutes Real Love?
Which is more loving? Stripping children buck naked of defense mechanisms in an environment of terrorist mayhem and murder addressed to their homeland? Or doing your dead-level best to open their eyes and teach them how best to protect themselves, their families and their nation against that terror?
“But children are too tender to be involved in anything so traumatic to their need for nurturing.”
Baloney yet again.
Consider this nation’s own nurturing.
Facing Frontier Reality
During colonial days before America became a tottering new nation, it was one serious time to be alive – and to remain so.
In tiny cabins beyond the Allegheny and Cumberland mountains were born children surrounded by even-earlier Americans who were prepared to fight to their own and someone else’s death to preserve their ancient tribal lands and heritage.
Those children of pioneer families were assigned roles and given duties to perform, assuming their share of what had to be done to protect those precarious homesteads and precious lives within.
Living Amid Reality
Their parents understood full well the meaning of terror, and they lived their lives and raised their offspring accordingly – awareness and preparedness over ignorance and vulnerability.
Did that produce children scared out of their wits or future adults whose psyches were shredded to the point they were left gibbering idiots cowering under their beds, cursing their parents for not loving them enough?
No, it produced generations of resourceful, determined Americans who had what it took to build a nation despite enormous obstacles.
Reality Was No Secret
During the American Revolution, there was no hiding from children that their patriot parents – mothers and fathers alike – courageously risked being hanged as traitors. That vivid reality was amply evident to young eyes.
During the Civil War, children on either side of the Mason-Dixon Line, white and black, were not spared face-to-face confrontations with what it meant to endure privations and afflictions of a nation torn by the bloodiest of conflicts. They saw their fathers and brothers, missing an arm, without a leg, limping home. Or watched them buried and their mothers and sisters left to fend as best they could.
In World War I, no American child was indulged ignorance of what was happening Over There, including gas attacks in the trenches.
Not for Adults Only
World War II found American children, in classrooms and at home, learning geography and what the Axis powers were doing as they spread like spilled ink across the world map.
They gathered tin cans of accumulated bacon grease for conversion of its glycerin into munitions. They fulfilled those and a multitude of other patriotic duties, some merely symbolic, others critically important, in furtherance of America’s war effort.
There was no conspiracy of silence sheltering those children from what it would mean if America lost that war. They had seen the photos of the Bataan death march, the fall of Paris, the skeletal corpses stacked outside the furnaces.
That Was Then
No one suggested they not view in movie theaters the latest news reels from the European and Pacific fronts. No one switched off the radio when Edward R. Murrow reported, “This is London,” during the blitz of England.
Today, though, it is an altogether different matter.
Parents under persuasion of the coddlers of psyches hastily click family remote channel-changers when news intrudes on mind-numbing, baby-sitting television shows. They conceal from their children the scenes of terrorists crashing airliners laden with passengers and aviation fuel into the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers. Heaven forfend, they might have to explain.
Conversation about what Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are doing to human beings, including little children, is not engaged in their homes.
Let’s Pretend vs. Let’s Get Real
“Violence on television is not good for children,” say the same parents who rush to video stores to purchase for their young the latest thumb games that enable them to inflict nothing but violence upon frenetic virtual characters from whom they are conveniently disassociated electronically.
Such children are considered by their parents as precocious due to their dexterity with machines of make-believe, while the real-life Age of Terrorism roils all about them.
Those are the same parents who, as children themselves, were likely conditioned by politically correct parents to live lives of reality-denial and self-absorption.
Bin Laden’s Deadly Game
An America deadened to the quick by permissive indulgence and personal gratification, cloaked in a cocoon of oblivion as to what’s going on in this world, is just exactly what practitioners of terror are looking for when they head this way. And many parents are playing straight into their hands.
“Like is real! Life is earnest!” wrote Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and he wasn’t kidding.
What possible, authentic benefit is there to be achieved by hiding those venerable truths from the children of America – the children who, if they make it that far, will one day become the next generation of American adults?
Spare not the young the realities of today if they are to be spared the consequences of tomorrow.
- John L. Perry, a prize-winning newspaper editor and writer
