Little-League Syndrome and Learned Incompetence

REFERENCE: Ruben Navarrette, "America must end its complacency," Ventura County Star. 2 May 2017: 9A

                      

             In an effectively-argued attack on complacency among US Boomers, GenX, and Millennials, Ruben Navarrette is both too restrained and too expansive in arguing "America must end its complacency" (Star May 2, 2017).

            Concerning child-raising, Navarrette is too young to appreciate how much many American parents the last couple generations indoctrinated their kids in learned incompetence. I've called it "Little-League Syndrome," but the problem includes school sports teams and the other ways that adults organize the play of young children and what should be apprentice-adults. Kids today play better ball than we did, and the "syndrome" has been generally good for father-daughter relationships; but many American children have been taught that they're incompetent to organize even a pick-up softball game, and adolescents are taught they're incompetent to run their own park sports leagues.

            Until 1960, anyway, high school students in Chicago could join (illegal) high school fraternities and sororities, and social/athletic clubs and did organize park sports leagues — and run some of our dances and at least one charity.

            No more; now there's constant adult supervision, and control.

            On the other hand. there is "the migration habit" with individuals and peoples learning that one way to deal with bad situations is to move on. Outside of real horror shows involving a lot of death, though, only some of the people move on; others have stayed, and they, too, have a point. Similarly for people's staying on jobs long enough to learn the jobs well and for workers to form communities.

            "Change is good," on occasion, but so are continuity, stability, and not having to "re-tool" constantly.

            So: Let the kids out to play and start treating adolescents like young adults. But also allow people reasonable security, including job security, and the chance to settle down.

Collegiate Age of Anxiety: "Stranger Danger!!"

Apparently, Letters to the Editor of The Ventura County Star published on line do not appear in Google searches. I will therefore immodestly post them on this blog. Under the shorter title "Age of Anxiety," this letter appeared in The Star for 9 October 2015.

Collegiate age of anxiety

REFERENCE: "A call to action after devastating campus events" by Luis Sanchez, President of Moorpark College, Star, 27 September 2015.

            In a column in the Star for September 27, Luis Sanchez, President of Moorpark College notes that "Many of America's college students today live with acute anxiety" partly because they grew up post-9/11, with its shattering of the "illusion of […] security" and how "The horrors of global terrorism, international discord, and even domestic strife have assaulted our children relentlessly through the Internet and […] smart phones […]."

            President Sanchez tweaks the Parable of the Lost Sheep (Luke 15.3-7) and ends with "the shepherd who delivers 99 sheep safely but loses one to the wolf" and how "our joy for the 99 is overwhelmed by our grief at the loss of the one."

            Today's students and more important the parents of today's students grew up in an America of "Stranger Danger!" in which usually well-meaning people have worked effectively to assault parents relentlessly with images and stories not of the figurative one lost sheep in a hundred but far smaller percentages of kids abducted and murdered by strangers, lured into drug addiction or slavery, attacked by sharks, molested by sexual predators, killed in home invasions, or gunned down in their classrooms.

            Americans generally, and journalists particularly, do poorly at risk assessment. Advertisers, marketers, and propagandists for an array of causes — many quite worthy — competently manipulate psychological weakness that can render us "overwhelmed by our grief at the loss of the one" child in a hundred thousand or more, underrating both the safety of most middle-class kids and everyday insecurity for poor kids.

            Many American college students should be anxious and non-clinically depressed because their elders are putting them into debt and not providing decent jobs when they graduate; but too many "live with acute anxiety" because they grew up with parents kept near-constantly anxious and afraid.

Preserve, Protect, and Defend ... (3 Nov. 2012)

"Preserve, Protect, and Defend" America, Not Necessarily Americans  

   
               A fair number of Americans, including American Presidents, assert that the first duty of the President of the United States is to protect the American people, to protect Americans.

                  And then a smaller group of us pedantic sorts, especially small-r republicans, assert that no, the key duties of the President are to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed," serve as commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the United States, and, as s/he swears or affirms — no American may be required to swear an oath — to "preserve, protect[,] and defend the Constitution of the United States."

                  Now does "Constitution" here mean every clause, phrase, and mark of punctuation in the document? The Constitution in its original form — e.g., with the assumption that slavery legally exists and that new slaves could be imported until 1808? Of course not. "Constitution" in the oath means the written document, as amended, plus something like "Constitution" in the British sense of the term.

                  I'd put it that the primary duty of the President is to defend the Republic, the American Republic as constituted in its essentials by the document, The Constitution of the United States. Let's put it, the primary duty of the President is to protect not Americans, but America.

                  This idea is in useful tension with the commonplace truth from Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan to John Stuart Mill in On Liberty to our own Declaration of Independence that the primary duty of any government is to protect its people.

                  Most Americans are either loud about their patriotism or keep their mouths shut; relatively few Americans get arrested any given year — so most Americans, most respectable, voting Americans, would be safer in a police state. Insofar as we have avoided a police state, we put at risk a fair number of decent, innocent Americans.

                  If the tree of liberty is fertilized from time to time with the blood of patriots, it is also fertilized with the blood of men, women, and children who die, or are wounded or maimed, because we make the State prove people guilty and grant bail and allow free speech to those who will insult God and the Prophet Mohammed. Well, and so forth through the Bill of Rights and traditional ideals of liberty.

                  At various times, however, and the years following 11 September 2001 have made up one of those times, there has been consistent over-emphasis on the part of US Presidents and the Congress and other leaders to protect Americans and consistent reluctance to tell the American people to toughen up and be willing to take casualties — civilian casualties — to preserve traditional rights.

                  There has been a failure to explain that even furthering US interests can have its costs, and a balancing favor to continue whether perceived interests are US interests and just what we mean be the interests of America.

                  We cannot have US ambassadors walled up in fortress embassies; we cannot have US Special Forces holed up in secure areas: to do their jobs they must get out among the people, including among people who want to kill them and sometimes succeed.

                  Ambassador Chris Stevens died doing his job, as did two of the CIA security officers who died responding to the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi in Libya, along with at least one other American.
                  To protect America, in some cases even to just achieve US policy goals, some Americans have to risk death or horrible injury, and sometimes they suffer.

                  The first duty of the President is to protect America and further its interests, and to do so s/he may have to get some Americans killed. Each President need to explain this nasty fact to each generation of the American public, and each generation has to debate where to strike a balance.

                  On 22 April 1971, speaking for Vietnam Veterans Against the War — against what we Americans call the Vietnam War — John Kerry asked rhetorically, "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" Or, arguably, worse than a mistake: we continue to debate the morality of the Vietnam War. What isn't debatable is that the President and government of the United States can err, horribly, and order Americans to kill and die in conflicts that are not necessary to preserve America, wars that hurt America.
                  This idea, too, needs to enter the debate.

                  A bumper sticker is not a philosophy, Charlie Brown, and one-liners on "the first duty of the President" aren't serious consideration of difficult issues.

                  We Americans need to toughen up and be willing to take risks necessary to preserve our freedoms (and our dignity). For example, making US airports less secure but freer puts lives at risk. So be it, I say: I sometimes take planes, and I'm for loosening up security. Let's debate that.

                  We Americans need to get our troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan and much of the rest of the world and shift money from "kinetic" military operations into the civilian economy. Such pulling back will save military lives and may put at risk civilians. So be that as well — and let us debate that also.