Idyll Reflections

Wargames: It's probably a healthy development when parents are allowing children to play games of war again, as reported in this piece by Fox News. Play allows children to explore the violent side of life (and the risk of death) and the sort of heroism prominent in combat. People must work through emotions; not blindly shut them off because of someone else's feelings. A reasoned confrontation (and not a purely political repression) with feeling allows a healthy psyche. It seems unhealthy to fetishize violence and combat to the extreme that a number of "soccer moms" practice; it grants violence an unhealthy power over children. After all, a child's thinking may go, if even playing at a topic can strike such fear into my parents' heart, imagine what actually pursuing it could lead to. Not that I am denying the power of violent conflict, for it does have a very peculiar power, but we must keep its power in the appropriate sphere.

Frightful Silence: In Iowa's Willowbrook Elementary School, a new policy has been instituted: complete silence during lunch. According to the administration, this has been instituted so that children will eat all their lunches and in order to cut down on disciplinary problems in the lunch room. How about silent recess for the children? That will ensure that they spend time physically exercising and not wasting time chatting/developing independent relationships. How about no recess at all? That will certainly cut down on outside disciplinary infractions. It's heartwarming to find the extent to which our school teachers will attempt to kill the spirit of children.

Frightful Silence: In Iowa's Willowbrook Elementary School, a new policy has been instituted: complete silence during lunch. According to the administration, this has been instituted so that children will eat all their lunches and in order to cut down on disciplinary problems in the lunch room. How about silent recess for the children? That will ensure that they spend time physically exercising and not wasting time chatting/developing independent relationships. How about no recess at all? That will certainly cut down on outside disciplinary infractions. It's heartwarming to find the extent to which our school teachers will attempt to kill the spirit of our children.

The Continuing War on Terror

I think that it might prove instructive to look at the rhetoric of terror and warring against terror during the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan. What were the poles of argument, and how did the methods eventually proceed against their terrorist tactics? If anyone has any information, don't hesitate to send it in to me. In my opinion, this is definitely worth looking into...

The "Arab Street" that "Big Media" Doesn't Want You to Hear

Courtesy of Little Green Footballs, here's a report from a US Marine in the streets of Iraq. The full article is here. While I am unsure of the extent and effectiveness of pro-American sentiment in Iraq, I am pretty certain that it does deeply complicate the nattering of many mediacrats. Contrary to the wildest dreams of New York pseudo-intellegentsia, the liberation of Iraq has not produced universal (or even, perhaps, wide-spread) hate-America sentiment among the Iraqi people. Instead, reaction to the fall of Saddam and the resulting attempt at stability has divided the population into a number of camps. Some want liberty; some want Western-style prosperity; some want a quasi-theocratic-fascist tyrrany; some want a traditional Islamic society; and so on and so forth.
The depth of these divisions deeply influences the capacity of Iraq to become a stable, unified country. If these divisions are too deep, the notion of a coalition of states becomes more workable and likely. Such a coaltion may, in any case, be for the best; it will allow each group to maintain its own identity and laws. Of course, the how is a very big question.

Doin' Time Overtime

According to this new study by the Department of Justice, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world . 1 in 37 adults serving in prison or having served time there is an awfully high number. While higher rates of incarceration may, to some extent, be helpful in reducing crime rates, I very much wonder at the helpfulness of one quarter of these incarcerations being for drug-related (and mostly) non-violent crimes.
What I find even more troubling than these statistics, however, is the "life sentence" that felons serve in a number of states and the country as a whole: the record of a felony will follow an individual through his whole life and will keep him from a number of his rights. In a number of states, felons are denied the right to vote, to gain some forms of government assistance, and the right to self-defense. Indeed, much of the "debate" about the Second Amendment turns upon denying felons the right to protection and the extent to which this right should be curtailed. If you add in the constant discrimination faced by a felon due to background checks, we are coming closer and closer to creating a class of permanent menials/criminals. If people are not given the chance to make a fresh start, they will have an extremely hard (indeed, perhaps almost impossible) time becoming integrated into society. While legislation can (obviously) not end the troubles of our felons, it can attempt to shift the culture back to some humanity though restoring their voting ability and, to some extent, their access to public funds and their right to defend themselves.