Today's children are tomorrows voters! That is the point of this blog.
The die has already been cast for who will be tomorrow's voters. They are the children of the 80's and 90's. I think that we all know that those children are a lot different from those of the 30's, 40's and 50's, but how? As a kid I remember stories about the Spartans who raised their kids to be strong warriors and I was impressed. Since, I have read the writings of people like John Stewart Mills who also had his ideas of the time on how to raise kids. What both of these had in common was that you were not doing the child a favor by making early life too soft, but that is what we apparently have done. For my money, I think it all started with the urban Jewish writer Dr. Spock who wrote his book on how to raise children in New York City, A lot of people who were not Jewish and who did not live in New York City took his book to heart and used it to raise their children.\\
Rather than expose children to some of the hardships of life, Dr. Spock proposed that they should be treated like infants and that is what many parents did. Those parents claimed that they did not want their children to have to endure the same hardships that they had endured. That was their excuse, not realizing that those hardships are what made them the persons that they are today. It is interesting how it worked. The bigger problem is that this same pattern continued with each generation making childhood less and less stressful. You know how things have ended up.
Think of sports as a way to see how this all worked. Most of us know that if you want to get stronger that you have to "exercise" your muscles. Simple and we all agree. Exactly why do we need strong muscles? If we want to compete in any sport, we need strong muscles. Isn't life like that too? We need the strength to push on when things don't go our way, but today young people claim that life is not fair and that some boogy man is discriminating against them. It has to be be some kind of racism. How many times have heard something like that? Too many!
Many years ago I was very surprised to hear about a school that was carpeting the class rooms. I could think of nothing more stupid. The claim was that it made the class room less noisy and thus the children could study better. Isn't this exactly the type of thing that I have been talking about? Rather than make the world easier to deal with, they should have made it "normal". The real world that our schools are supposed to be preparing our children for is not a quiet soft place. It is noisy and very disorganized, but that is the world that these children will have to live in and survive. This is just one example.
Look at our young voters today. They don't want to have to compete with others who may be stronger then they are. They don't want to compete with others who worked harder and are more prepared for life. They want mother, the government, to protect them and make sure that they get their fair share of the food, even if they did not do any work to produce it. Remember the story about the "Little Red Hen"? It is against the rules to read that story in schools today, because it would not be "fair".
You only have to look around the world at places who had a "soft" life to understand why those societies failed. Who were the people who sat in the seats at the Roman Colosseum to watch people kill one another? They must have been the same people that I am talking about here and how did they all end up? Look at Spain, they stole Gold by the ship loads from the Native Americans. Was Spain living the good life, or what? You bet and how did they end up? It is the same pattern through out history, but we seem not to have learned our lesson. Even today with the Covid-19 epidemic, our government want to borrow money from future generations so that we do not have to suffer today. Isn't that the same kind of thing that I have been talking about? We need to toughen up and put up with the pain, but you can see that, maybe, we have already gone over the edge too far.
Remember the old saying that, "....you reap what you have sown---". I guess that it must be harvest time!
The die has already been cast for who will be tomorrow's voters. They are the children of the 80's and 90's. I think that we all know that those children are a lot different from those of the 30's, 40's and 50's, but how? As a kid I remember stories about the Spartans who raised their kids to be strong warriors and I was impressed. Since, I have read the writings of people like John Stewart Mills who also had his ideas of the time on how to raise kids. What both of these had in common was that you were not doing the child a favor by making early life too soft, but that is what we apparently have done. For my money, I think it all started with the urban Jewish writer Dr. Spock who wrote his book on how to raise children in New York City, A lot of people who were not Jewish and who did not live in New York City took his book to heart and used it to raise their children.\\
Rather than expose children to some of the hardships of life, Dr. Spock proposed that they should be treated like infants and that is what many parents did. Those parents claimed that they did not want their children to have to endure the same hardships that they had endured. That was their excuse, not realizing that those hardships are what made them the persons that they are today. It is interesting how it worked. The bigger problem is that this same pattern continued with each generation making childhood less and less stressful. You know how things have ended up.
Think of sports as a way to see how this all worked. Most of us know that if you want to get stronger that you have to "exercise" your muscles. Simple and we all agree. Exactly why do we need strong muscles? If we want to compete in any sport, we need strong muscles. Isn't life like that too? We need the strength to push on when things don't go our way, but today young people claim that life is not fair and that some boogy man is discriminating against them. It has to be be some kind of racism. How many times have heard something like that? Too many!
Many years ago I was very surprised to hear about a school that was carpeting the class rooms. I could think of nothing more stupid. The claim was that it made the class room less noisy and thus the children could study better. Isn't this exactly the type of thing that I have been talking about? Rather than make the world easier to deal with, they should have made it "normal". The real world that our schools are supposed to be preparing our children for is not a quiet soft place. It is noisy and very disorganized, but that is the world that these children will have to live in and survive. This is just one example.
Look at our young voters today. They don't want to have to compete with others who may be stronger then they are. They don't want to compete with others who worked harder and are more prepared for life. They want mother, the government, to protect them and make sure that they get their fair share of the food, even if they did not do any work to produce it. Remember the story about the "Little Red Hen"? It is against the rules to read that story in schools today, because it would not be "fair".
You only have to look around the world at places who had a "soft" life to understand why those societies failed. Who were the people who sat in the seats at the Roman Colosseum to watch people kill one another? They must have been the same people that I am talking about here and how did they all end up? Look at Spain, they stole Gold by the ship loads from the Native Americans. Was Spain living the good life, or what? You bet and how did they end up? It is the same pattern through out history, but we seem not to have learned our lesson. Even today with the Covid-19 epidemic, our government want to borrow money from future generations so that we do not have to suffer today. Isn't that the same kind of thing that I have been talking about? We need to toughen up and put up with the pain, but you can see that, maybe, we have already gone over the edge too far.
Remember the old saying that, "....you reap what you have sown---". I guess that it must be harvest time!
