That incident is only one of seemingly disparate items that have me reflecting on the relationship between good citizenship and self-reliance. First there was that disturbing video of the Palestinian Kindergarten graduation. I don't know what to make of it. It's obviously evil to indoctrinate innocent minds with poison. What I'm not sure of is whether that video indicates utter impotence -- it's pathetic to take your sense of strength & pride from seeing your 6-year-old in a costume shouting militant slogans; or if it represents a twisted kind of vigor that my own children (their generation) must be prepared to confront. Are we training our kids to be tough enough?
I'm not suggesting boot camp for babies. But post-9/11 I thought it was understood that we're all supposed to be ready to take down bad guys on planes --and yet this stewardess couldn't find help from any of the "young" (which could be 30-40 in this case) folk; they not only didn't help, they shivered and cried. And then there were the VA Tech kids who just froze and waited to be shot --no one thought to rush the bum, as Mark Steyn said at the time & it is now not too soon to point out.
Which they did because this is how we train our kids. There's the phenomenon of the "helicopter parent." And the assualt on boys and on manliness generally that Christina Hoff Sommers has documented. All over the country for the past few years there's been a big emphasis on anti-bullying curricula which teach kids it's bad to be mean; bully for that, but they also train kids to "practice non-violence" by walking away from bullies, which it seems to me means letting the bullies rule the roost. When you grow up, that's called dhimmitude. What we ought to be teaching is that it's unmanly (or for girls, ugly) to be a bully. (We tell the Weedlets Christianity requires them to defend the weak and weird kids who get picked on, not merely refuse to join in: which I suppose will get them expelled from school or taken from us by CPS some day.)
People know this --it's what accounts for The Dangerous Book for Boys phenomenon (it gets 6 thumbs up from our 3 junior men, btw). But then I ran across this in a Lileks column
Click to enlarge and read the text (there's also a laxative ad with the slogan "keep fit for your country").
All of this seems related, somehow, to the answer I heard the very experienced vocations recruiter of a burgeoning order give years ago. Someone asked him what parents could do to cultivate vocations and his answer was, "help your kids be tough." His reasoning was that both marriage and the religious life are tough ways of life; both require generosity and the capacity for sacrifice -- and many folks with genuine vocations in his experience simply lacked the human virtues necessary to follow through on a commitment. If you do everything for your son, what kind of husband are you wishing on your future daughter-in-law? Or how will he or she hack it in missionary conditions?
These are things you think about on the last day of school as you ponder what goals to set for summer achievement in the context of rumors the Pope's next encyclical will be about work. What books to read, what chores to assign, what virtues to build?
Update: One idea I intended to make explicit was the understanding of an earlier time that one must be self-reliant and strong not for one's own sake --not so you wouldn't need anybody-- but for the sake of the common good: so you'd be ready when called upon. It may be counter-intuitive, but as the bonds of family and community have broken down, we've actually become less self-reliant rather than moreso. When you think about it you can understand why, but isn't that odd?
