Mack
Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Sergeant Rock
Talks to the Trees
Fifty
shades of electronic dyes have been splashed on the screens of millions of
little plastic boxes regarding young people’s sense of entitlement. The stereotype promoted is that young people in
our time suffer unrealistic expectations of privilege and immunity from the
consequences of their own actions.
Thank
goodness we have such positive, grown-up role models as 41-year-old Lance
Armstrong, 61-year-old General David Petraeus , and 72-year-old Senator Barbara
“Don’t call me ma’am” Boxer to help America mold the youth of tomorrow into
selfless adults focused on the greater good of the Republic.
Stereotyping
is wrong; it considers an isolated action or attribute in an individual and falsely
applies it to a group sharing other attributes of the individual which are not
connected psychologically, ethically, or morally to the first attribute. If, say, an 80-year-old woman microwaves cats
for amusement, it does not thus follow that microwaving cats is an attribute
common to all 80-year-old women. Joseph
Stalin smoked a pipe, but few pipe-smokers are atheist genocidal maniacs. The late Kim Jong-Il of North Korea wore
pantsuits, but that doesn’t mean that people who wear pantsuits are fond of
herding people into slave-labor camps.
Stereotyping
is the assembly of false analogies, and is as illogical as it is
unethical.
And,
certainly, bashing the young is no new thing: C. S. Lewis criticized the post-war fashion in
excessive praise of children in “Screwtape Proposes a Toast.” But then he got married and helped raise
stepsons, and apparently decided that young’uns weren’t so bad after all.
One
cannot deny that many 15- to 20-year-olds are narcissistic; that is a function
of childhood which the maturing person sloughs off through
self-discipline. To fault a 15-year-old
for being narcissistic is to fault a 15-year-old for being, well, 15 years old. Generally, they get over it, but sometimes
they fail, and then they become environmentalists.
Although
we help young people grow out of self-obsession, the Marines are now to be
taught to be narcissistic (and when one writes “narcissistic,” one thanks
whatever gods Henley thought of for spell-check, eh!), according to the
Associated Press.
In
Camp Pendleton’s sunny clime where I used to spend my time (sorry, Rudyard),
Marines will now be taught “meditative practices, yoga-type stretching and
exercises based on mindfulness.”
In
2011 a Naval Health Research Center scientist (whoever that august personage
might be) conducted one of the first experiments – more are to follow -- on
Marines in which, after a practice assault on a practice Afghan village with
lots of practice shooting and practice screaming and yelling, the Marines
(whose new battle cry is “Over the Top, Devil Lab Rats!”) were then required to
take some me-time to practice their Buddhist-inspired meditation techniques and
get in touch with their feelings.
One
of the let’s-all-go-to-our-happy-place practices prescribed for the Marines,
according to the AP, was “to sit in silence and stare at their combat boots,
becoming aware of how their feet touched the classroom floor.”
One
does not imagine that the giddy Mujahadeen in Afghanistan will indulge Marines
in breaking off a fight to take a therapeutic pause to contemplate how their
combat boots touch the blood-sodden ground:
“Private
Smith, have you checked that weapon? We
can expect a counterattack.”
“No,
Gunny-Guru; I’ve been marveling at my new one-ness with the universe in
meditating upon the circle of life and being-ness in my bootlaces. I feel so at peace.”
Young
Marines assaulting a strongpoint will soon, under the tutelage of Navy
scientists, fling flowers and the collected works of Alan Watts at the enemy.
In
sum, we needn’t worry about ordinary young people working painfully through
adolescence; they’re doing better than many of the adults.
-30-
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