Friday, June 15, 2007
Pissing people off
They say war is hell.
I have never been to war. I cannot say from personal experience. I can only imagine the traumas that our soldiers have to face on a daily basis fighting in the Middle East, for what some say is a righteous, much needed police action, and others say an abomination based solely on lining the pockets of the first family with oil money. I would personally like to see us just take the country away form the people who haven’t had peace in their land for 3000 years. Like a petulant child and their favorite toy. Take it away and promise to give it back only when they decide to behave.
But that isn’t what concerns me today. What concerns me today is that the army is calling for more psychiatrists to help our soldiers with the mental trauma they have been exposed to in war.
Now I know that this is going to sound wrong, and will piss off several million people (as if that many people even know I exist) but I read the article here , and all I could think about was history, the history of war, the damages that Soldiers all over the world have experienced since the dawn of time. This article made me wonder;”is this the begging of the end? Is this the slippery slope of exposing how much of a sissified country we have become?”
Again, I am not trying to downplay the seriousness of war, nor that our men and women are in need of mental health care to help deal with what they see and hear in a war zone. HOWEVER, this to me screams of mental and physical un-toughness, brought on by raising a generation of people who have learned that crying gets you what you want.
Maybe the millions of soldiers throughout history suffered the exact same traumas in all of the battles ever fought, and had the same mental anguish. But why has it taken 3 million years of fighting to get to the point where we need more psychiatrists? Was the battle of D-Day, where over 10,000 allied troops lost their lives in a single afternoon, less traumatic than fighting an insurgency in Iraq? Or did we raise a generation of people who never learned to do for themselves, and thus don’t have the mental capacity to handle the horrors of war? And I’m not saying the horrors of war are something you should have to handle, fuck knows I have never had to deal with anything that traumatic, but it is a term everyone knows.
My Dad’s favorite saying was “Knock that off or I’ll kick your ass up between your shoulder blades”, I knew that when this phrase was uttered that I had went as far as I could without getting a beating. I also knew that when Mom reached “3”, or sometimes “1”, my ass was getting beat. Why did I know that? Because she never held back on consequences, if you do “A”, then “B” will happen…and yes “B” stands for beating. My brother and I were the worst kids in 3 counties, but we always weighed the options, we were smart like that. But we also knew that when we were caught it would result in an ass whipping, did it change our behavior? Yes it did we learned where the boundaries were and what happened when we decided to cross them. Today’s kids and the people one generation behind me, they didn’t have boundaries, or didn’t have consequences when those boundaries were crossed.
I just spoke to one of my co-workers about this and he agrees that the previous generations have us beat hands down in the toughness category. His Grandpa had to unload the bodies in San Diego from the D-Day invasion, my Grandpa never talked about the war, but he got his hand caught in the nuts of his combine, lost a finger, wrapped a greasy rag around the stump drove to the ER, walked in, held it up and demanded to have it “fixed”. When asked “where is the rest of it” he replied “I ain’t got time for that shit, just sew it up”, 2 hours later, he was back to work on his combine.
We are the only country in the world that has silly shit wrong with us. Lactose intolerance? C’MON! do you think Habib in N. Africa has a lactose intolerance problem? I seriously doubt that he would turn down any food since he is eating Sally Struthers’ table scraps. We are the fattest country in the history of people walking upright, we make shit up to fund medical research, and buy shit we don’t need. I’m not discounting the trauma that these soldiers are feeling, or the need for psychiatrists, but I do think that this is a big shiny light in a dark corner that we don’t want to see, but we need to see.
We have raised a generation of sissys, a generation of whiny cry baby assed kids who look up to people like Paris Hilton instead of their parents or teachers or community leaders, and then when they decide to give something back, and join our military, we hand them a rifle and tell them to go ahead and walk into that fire fight against people with no military uniforms, so you can’t tell the good guys from the bad, and then treat them like shit because they went to war, and didn’t stand up and tell our government to back off this is a dumb idea.
My friend KFK, joined the Marine Reserve to get his college partially paid for, and because he liked the uniform…Yeah I know a couple of great ideas, his unit was called up 2 weeks after he completed basic training for the first gulf war. I call him and thank him for everything he sacrificed, wanted or not, every Veterans Day.
So do we need more psychiatrists? Probably.
Is this a wake up call to stop pampering our fucking kids?
I think so.
I have never been to war. I cannot say from personal experience. I can only imagine the traumas that our soldiers have to face on a daily basis fighting in the Middle East, for what some say is a righteous, much needed police action, and others say an abomination based solely on lining the pockets of the first family with oil money. I would personally like to see us just take the country away form the people who haven’t had peace in their land for 3000 years. Like a petulant child and their favorite toy. Take it away and promise to give it back only when they decide to behave.
But that isn’t what concerns me today. What concerns me today is that the army is calling for more psychiatrists to help our soldiers with the mental trauma they have been exposed to in war.
Now I know that this is going to sound wrong, and will piss off several million people (as if that many people even know I exist) but I read the article here , and all I could think about was history, the history of war, the damages that Soldiers all over the world have experienced since the dawn of time. This article made me wonder;”is this the begging of the end? Is this the slippery slope of exposing how much of a sissified country we have become?”
Again, I am not trying to downplay the seriousness of war, nor that our men and women are in need of mental health care to help deal with what they see and hear in a war zone. HOWEVER, this to me screams of mental and physical un-toughness, brought on by raising a generation of people who have learned that crying gets you what you want.
Maybe the millions of soldiers throughout history suffered the exact same traumas in all of the battles ever fought, and had the same mental anguish. But why has it taken 3 million years of fighting to get to the point where we need more psychiatrists? Was the battle of D-Day, where over 10,000 allied troops lost their lives in a single afternoon, less traumatic than fighting an insurgency in Iraq? Or did we raise a generation of people who never learned to do for themselves, and thus don’t have the mental capacity to handle the horrors of war? And I’m not saying the horrors of war are something you should have to handle, fuck knows I have never had to deal with anything that traumatic, but it is a term everyone knows.
My Dad’s favorite saying was “Knock that off or I’ll kick your ass up between your shoulder blades”, I knew that when this phrase was uttered that I had went as far as I could without getting a beating. I also knew that when Mom reached “3”, or sometimes “1”, my ass was getting beat. Why did I know that? Because she never held back on consequences, if you do “A”, then “B” will happen…and yes “B” stands for beating. My brother and I were the worst kids in 3 counties, but we always weighed the options, we were smart like that. But we also knew that when we were caught it would result in an ass whipping, did it change our behavior? Yes it did we learned where the boundaries were and what happened when we decided to cross them. Today’s kids and the people one generation behind me, they didn’t have boundaries, or didn’t have consequences when those boundaries were crossed.
I just spoke to one of my co-workers about this and he agrees that the previous generations have us beat hands down in the toughness category. His Grandpa had to unload the bodies in San Diego from the D-Day invasion, my Grandpa never talked about the war, but he got his hand caught in the nuts of his combine, lost a finger, wrapped a greasy rag around the stump drove to the ER, walked in, held it up and demanded to have it “fixed”. When asked “where is the rest of it” he replied “I ain’t got time for that shit, just sew it up”, 2 hours later, he was back to work on his combine.
We are the only country in the world that has silly shit wrong with us. Lactose intolerance? C’MON! do you think Habib in N. Africa has a lactose intolerance problem? I seriously doubt that he would turn down any food since he is eating Sally Struthers’ table scraps. We are the fattest country in the history of people walking upright, we make shit up to fund medical research, and buy shit we don’t need. I’m not discounting the trauma that these soldiers are feeling, or the need for psychiatrists, but I do think that this is a big shiny light in a dark corner that we don’t want to see, but we need to see.
We have raised a generation of sissys, a generation of whiny cry baby assed kids who look up to people like Paris Hilton instead of their parents or teachers or community leaders, and then when they decide to give something back, and join our military, we hand them a rifle and tell them to go ahead and walk into that fire fight against people with no military uniforms, so you can’t tell the good guys from the bad, and then treat them like shit because they went to war, and didn’t stand up and tell our government to back off this is a dumb idea.
My friend KFK, joined the Marine Reserve to get his college partially paid for, and because he liked the uniform…Yeah I know a couple of great ideas, his unit was called up 2 weeks after he completed basic training for the first gulf war. I call him and thank him for everything he sacrificed, wanted or not, every Veterans Day.
So do we need more psychiatrists? Probably.
Is this a wake up call to stop pampering our fucking kids?
I think so.
