Fish or Cut Bait?

I was once told that everything I needed to know I learned in, or before, kindergarten. By then I had learned right from wrong and the rest was just judgment and balancing circumstances. In my own personal background, I have to believe that I learned some of my core values regarding honor, integrity, patriotism, and others by the time I was three. I believe that because my values in those regards are vastly different from most of the people I grew up around from the age of four on. I can only attribute that to the area I was raised in to the age of three and the outlooks of the people I had as my foster parents for those early formative years. What all that has to do with this week’s topic of “Talk or Fight?” is this: at some point in everyone’s life – and probably a lot more than once – a person has to decide whether they will stand up for themselves or be a willing (to some extent) victim. In pondering that decision, I started thinking about the personality characteristics of the people I know who obviously stand up to the fight, refusing to be a victim. Conversely, I also thought about the people I know who would rather not fight even if it means becoming a victim.  (more…)

A while ago I wrote an article that brought great response about how some training circumstances and tools used by our military services today may actually be teaching our soldiers to die. What I mean to say is that the training may be conditioning them to expect their own death. In recent months I’ve been studying instances of violence where American citizens didn’t fight back; didn’t defend themselves; essentially were willing victims. As I’ve examined these instances I noticed somewhat of an age cap on the “willing victims” and I saw a link to our public school system and some policies that were developed in the late ’70s and early ’80s. This is a topic I’ve written about before, but I felt I needed to do some further study, and in this article I’m going to share some of that newly gleaned information with you. Additionally, I’m going to share a story about a thirteen year old 8th grader who, just in this past week, observed a set of circumstances in her school that led her to believe something might not be right. She shared her story with her father and he became VERY alarmed. We’ll discuss why. (more…)