Posted by Mike Field on 12/20/99 from 203.26.98.84 via proxy cache.net2000.com.au:
In Reply to: Re: WAR!- and another thing,,,,,,,,,,, posted by Rebecca on December 19, 1999 at 23:35:38:
Let me add my bit to Ian's and Rebecca's. For quite a while now I've thought that people in Australia (and I think other UK-derived societies at least) are over-controlled. Even in sailing, the last leisure activity that remained unregulated, we now have to carry life-jackets, flares, EPIRBs and goodness knows what other fancy stuff. Fair enough if you WANT to carry these things, and fair enough if you expect society to rescue you if something goes wrong. But some people, amazing as it apparently seems to the regulators, actually LIKE to do some things without a safety net. But it gets harder all the time.
Regulators, generally, are far too paternalistic for my taste -- they want to make everything clean, and sanitised, and safe, to protect us from ourselves. While all the time, what we really need is to be protected from them.
To get back to the "violence" in AR's books, for years as a kid I used to shoot people with a cap gun. (I don't think you can buy caps now, and certainly toy guns are illegal. But I'm told that if you really want to buy a real gun, it's no problem.) Apparently, though, toy guns incited children to commit murder in later life. (I must be a repressed murderer, because I can't remember the last time I killed someone.) I'm not sure whether bows and arrows have been banned yet. Judging from my unaerodynamic efforts as a kid, they must be really dangerous, though, so I suppose it won't be long.
And fireworks? What are they? I used to have a wonderful time on Empire Day and Guy Fawkes Day with fireworks -- tom thumbs, sixpenny bungers, roman candles, skyrockets, pinwheels, and the rest. And all the neighbourhood kids would congregate around a big bonfire in a local vacant block and had a whale of a time. Alas, my kids didn't get a chance at any of that. All banned. You can't even burn off the autumn leaves any more.
These days we teach "conflict management" in universities because we so policed people's activities as children that they couldn't learn it from their own experiences.
Now our societies have a huge drug problem. It's not surprising, We've so cleaned, and sanitised, and MADE SAFE anything that our kids liked doing by themselves that they don't have anything much else to live for.
If you haven't read Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" yet, now's the time.