Replies

Thank you for your assessment. The following is only my opinion—fodder for thought and a little different. I see high visibility: long fields of view, and only a very few friendly people. IIRC, you more often see built-up stuff or growth/concealment and relatively gobs of strangers all around you when not at sea. Different perspective here—a perspective lacking in some ways on my part, I’ll admit. No potential “zombies” here, as the few of them saw declines in their government-derived incomes, went through foreclosures, threw minor tantrums and hightailed it to more populated places.

There weren’t any first person shooter games before I went through 13 weeks of OSUT training—not the more realistic kind seen during and since the ‘90s, anyway (not even the early Doom game). Yeah, we fired at the silhouettes that went up and down on most of the M-16 ranges, although there were quite a few other kinds of ranges.

But other training methods may have had more to do with our willingness to mobilize and do our main job. Won’t go into those publicly here, and you already know about and have experienced most of them firsthand. As for first person shooter games, IMO, anyone who would feel more compelled to shoot innocents because of those would be ate the ___ up (psychotic), so to speak (confusing reality with fantasy).

Drug abuse might be a bad combination with civil interactions, too. So might apathy learned from growing up under sociopathic single/divorced parents (recent mass murders).

Consider the rearing environments of third-world, young killers of nations of peasants living in squalor and their lack of reluctance to kill enemy. Even green ones have displayed the emotions of lizards about the matter. Different outlooks on death in general in many places, perhaps?

Criminals, we know, don’t realistically consider consequences, and quite a few of them had upbringings similar, more or less, to that of Charles Manson. Remember his mother’s notorious activity. ...whole nation of parents, in various ways, similar to her around us now. Maybe it’s not healthy for a nation to be a whorehouse.

And maybe we’re only seeing a correction like that of the Great Depression, only greater (little interruption in the social playtime progressions of the elite folks there). Maybe the sun will rise in a brighter tomorrow, after we learn a few basic lessons about how to live right. Real conservatives prefer to conserve certain traditions. Hopefully, we’ll all learn more about that, difficult as lessons can be.

Can’t get blood out of a turnip or real, big revenues for a nation out of debtors and only a few government-connected monarchs in control of so many natural resources. We need a sufficient manufacturing base again and repeals of regulations to make way for it.