Monday, January 28, 2013

1.21.13, Sergeant Rock Talks to the Trees


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.

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