Root causes are often breathtakingly ugly. We don’t generally let boys play with dolls because they might become… good fathers. This turned up in a brief online discussion.
By the way, dangerous toys were mooted, too, and I have to say that, thinking back, many of the toys I had great harmless fun with would today be considered unconscionably dangerous. Know what changed? Responsibility shifted from parenting to lawsuits. In my childhood, we were taught, “Look. This can hurt people, so when using it we be careful, and if you’re going to be irresponsible with it, then we’ll take it away until you grow up some more.” Hell, we were proud to demonstrate how grown up.
Know how old I was when I got my very first real pocket knife? Six. Today that would be considered a crime and child abuse and unthinkably crazy. Knives are demonized now, even though they are arguably the most useful tool ever invented and should be part of everyone’s accoutrements.
I had a set of toy pistols that shot plastic, spring-loaded bullets. We had cap guns. We had chemistry sets with instructions on how to make explosives, radioactive stuff, and so on in the kit. I helped my father and his father in a wood shop from age 4 or 5. Sure, they gave me tasks suited to me, but I was occasionally taught to run a radial saw or how safely to do this or that atrociously dangerous thing. I have all my digits and limbs intact.
Political Correctness and lawsuits have rendered us helpless fat soft moronic saps, incompetent and incapable, entitled and pampered, the worst combination of deluded and ignorant.
Look around. You really think this is better than that? Is helplessness and panic an improvement over competence and stoicism? Why did we lose confidence in our individual ability? It was taught out of us by a thuggish, all–pervasive media serving the psychopathic greedy corporate fascists, who want us so absurdly infantllike that we must call AAA to get a flat tire changed or pay to have some schlub come build a knock-down shelf for us. Using those terrifying dangerous tools that are considered terrorism weapons by officials.
Fuck all that.
I still carry a knife and always will.
