This is absolutely ridiculous. Dammit, life is dangerous! How the hell is this generation of teacup kids supposed to ever function as adults, in a world that's out to kill them?
Scouts Out! Cavalry Ho!
Ironically, this sort of nonsense invariably trains our adults to function as kids.
14 year olds don’t operate mult-millon dollar farm equipment.
Also, farming is more essential then a game where men run around in tight pants trying to jump on the guy with the ball.
“... Oh my gosh, we won’t even get into how dangerous a military career would be...
This is absolutely ridiculous. Dammit, life is dangerous! How the hell is this generation of teacup kids supposed to ever function as adults, in a world that’s out to kill them?
Scouts Out! Cavalry Ho!”
Life is irreducibly dangerous.
But no one knows how low the dangers can be reduced, nor what unforeseen consequences might attend to reductions: we’re still arguing over the impact of past decreases. Is all of it ridiculous? Should we do more, or should we reverse the trends? The only thing we really know is that life isn’t as dangerous as it used to be.
Sports infuse an otherwise-dull, risk-poor existence with some real risk (for some participants), and provide entertainment (with the illusion of danger) for onlookers.
After putting in 29 years in uniform, I must note (only parenthetically) that the negative aspects of organized competitive team sports balance or outweigh the positive aspects, for the professional military.
Our popular culture has not yet figured out that we no longer live in the 19th century (we cannot live in the 20th century either): the concepts of teamwork and (honorable) competition have great merit, but in the electronic media era we inhabit now, stardom and celebrity culture have done in most of those ideals (thanks to other cultural trends, “honor” has departed too). That’s without the adverse effects of spectatorism ... TV has become so convenient and all-pervading that most watchers just assume they’re participants. Other posters have noticed the trend.
Military leaders rarely resist sports metaphors when exhorting, haranguing, or merely mixing with the troops. It’s (mostly) OK to go with what the masses know, but the truly dangerous trend here is an unspoken assumption that opponents grasp “the rules” and agree to them. This has not been true in warfare since 1800 at least; some participants noted it during the American Civil War, but most history buffs date the worst declines to World War I.
To judge by the last line posted, wku man has not learned that the horse cavalry was formally inactivated in 1943. Events moved rather more slowly in those days; horse soldiering was on life support since the 1870s, but the warning signs were available a generation earlier.
That's the entire point of this push for anti-violence and anti-bullying.
The goal:
To produce generations of swishy boy/men who are utterly incapable of defending themselves, their families ( if they can figure out how to form one), and their nation.
By the way....Have you noticed the nearly universal hairless chests on male actors in the last few years? ( They are males. Not men.)