This morning my five-year-old son carried a stick on the bus on his way to kindergarten. I warned him not to bother people with the stick. Repeatedly. When he came dangerously close once too often, I broke the stick and gave him back the big end. He cried for about 30 seconds and took better care of what was left of it.
What a banal story! Banal, but exceptional in this day and age. How is that?
No Weapons. Period!
He’ll survive – to become a man
In middle-class America boys are not allowed to play with sticks. They are surrounded by women—mothers, teachers, and all kinds of counselors—and women have no sympathy for sticks. Their fathers have have generally been conditioned not to allow it either. Sticks are bad.
There is a huge literature about why sticks are bad. Kids use sticks as play guns, and guns are bad. Kids use sticks as play swords, and swords are bad. Kids hit each other with sticks, and fighting is bad. The feminists attribute all of this to patriarchy. Little girls don’t play with sticks! This is a sure sign that little boys are still not civilized.
Certain approved toys did evolve from sticks, such as baseball bats, tennis rackets and croquet mallets. Their use is tolerated, but the kids are carefully instructed in exactly how to use them. Goofing around with them is not in the program.
Why aren’t little boys civilized?
We have been throwing sticks since we learned to walk upright
Feminist dogma to the rescue! Because of the patriarchy. You see, they explain, little boys and little girls are born with identical capacities and like natures. Gender is a social construct, they say. And somehow, in spite of everything they have done to prevent it, these little boys are being socialized in the nasty masculine way. Quit it! (The title of one of their tracts) they say. Learn to play nice.
These feminists are quick to point out that guns and swords did not exist in our evolutionary environment. A child’s desire to play with guns and swords has to have emerged, they reason, during the evil history of male dominance, when societies were always fighting one another for land, trade routes, women and whatnot.
As usual, the feminists have it wrong. Five or six million years ago, as our ancestors left the jungles for the African savanna and began to walk upright, two things happened. First, their hands became free. Second, they no longer had any place to hide from predators. They put one and one together, developed opposed thumbs that could hold sticks, and learned how to fight off the predators. Sticks were useful tools and digging roots and tubers. Sticks are a deep part of our evolutionary history. As males fought off the predators and alien tribes, it is the males who wound up instinctively using sticks.
What benefit is there to letting him have sticks?
An approved stick
The world is filled with dangerous objects such as knives, bricks, ladders and matches. On his path to adulthood a child has to learn how to cope with all of them. As he watches adults manipulate these things he wants to try. If you do not let him, he will remain a perpetual child—and perpetual children are precisely what we have all too many of in modern America and Europe.
Growing up involves risk. There is always a trade-off between the risk of getting hurt, and the risk of growing up scared to take initiative. The United States errs very far in the direction of being hypercautious. We chauffeur them every place rather than let them walk. We hustle them to the pediatrician at the slightest sign of a cough or sniffle. Moreover, schools forbid normal childhood play such as the game of tag, and we don’t let them wrestle much or race one another on the playground.
Why are American schools so strict?
Sometimes we call a stick a stick
American schools are designed to accept all children from a given geographical area, regardless of their sex, socioeconomic and family background, or race. A school is a one-size-fits-all institutions.
America is schizophrenic in its dedication to equality. On the one hand, the great majority of Americans supports the public school systems. On the other hand, that same great majority will move as far into the suburbs as necessary to get away from the riffraff. The children of the riffraff are not interested in learning; they destroy the educational environment for everybody else.
Schools have had to implement draconian controls to manage the disorderly segment. Common sense is out the window. Because some boys do harass girls, the most mild-mannered lad may be expelled if he screws up the courage to peck a girl on the cheek –even if she enjoys it! The slightest rap on the shoulder can be construed as a fight.
Back in the 1950s the teacher reigned in the classroom. The whole system, from the board of education down through the principal, trusted the teacher’s judgment when it came to discipline. Principals valued and respected teachers who could handle their own problems without sending children to his office.
Today, wealthy helicopter parents and social justice warriors have beaten the education system into submission. In the place of human judgment, which is subject to error, they have stringent policies on everything. The upshot is that they expel kids on absurd pretexts. And a byproduct is that boys do not have an opportunity to use their own judgment, to become men. No sticks, nothing resembling a stick, is allowed in a modern classroom.
Fights and schoolyard culture
Swords into plowshares – this morning’s stick now holds a Christmas star
The battle against bullying is front and center in the modern school. Anything that might be construed as bullying is absolutely forbidden. For good reason—the rougher kids have no sense of restraint. They don’t have the sense to stop fighting once they have won, and they are inclined to bring lethal hardware into the game.
Bullying is inherently cruel, and children have a way of being cruel. It must be forbidden. The implementation of anti-bullying policies, however, has an anti-male flavor to it. Girls can be extremely cruel to one another, but they usually—not always—do so more by social than physical means, and it is harder to police.
Although serving in the Army is a way to get shot, and America’s youth may be safer now that the draft is ended, military service did fill a valuable role in turning boys into men. The same might be said of schoolyard fights. The cost might have exceeded the benefit, but those of us who grew up in an era in which even middle-class kids got involved in fights developed a certain self-respect, an ability to take care of ourselves that today’s kids seem to lack.
Even the innocent scuffles that nursery school kids get into are instructive. Somebody invariably winds up crying, sometimes just because they lose and sometimes because they are actually hurt a little bit. It is an occasion for this father to use words that are forbidden on an American schoolyard: “Be a man!” He has to learn that sometimes you lose, sometimes you get hurt, but you have to keep on going.
One of my profoundest lessons came when I was about eight. My grandmother took care of us because mother had more urgent business. I came home crying and Granny asked me what it happened. I said “Ricky beat me up.” She cocked her head like an old hen, observed “You’re bigger than Ricky – you beat him up!” That was all the sympathy I got. I learned to stop crying and take care of my own problems.
Needless to say, the proclivity of the lower classes to get into deadly fights has necessitated schools implementing policies setting low thresholds for activity that might be construed as a fight. Middle-class kids are forced into behavior patterns that would have been considered sissy 50 years ago. It is demonstrably true that fewer of them get hurt than used to. Nobody asks what the cost might have been in terms of sacrificed manhood.
Conclusion
The conductor and other riders on the bus seem absolutely at ease with my kid having a small stick, but likewise at ease with my constantly reminding him that he has to watch out. I make him leave his stick at the schoolyard gate. I’m glad I live in a country where the government does not interfere with parents in raising children, and where there is not an ethnic dimension to school discipline. Kids have the freedom to make small mistakes and learn from them.
This analogy seems to inform the divide in American culture. Progressives want government to make strong laws controlling, even abolishing sticks. Libertarians and conservatives are more inclined to trust the people – parents and kids – to use their own judgment. Good judgment sometimes comes up short – kids do get hurt with sticks. But on the other hand, abolition doesn’t work and it fosters a weak people who look for solutions from authority instead of solving their own problems.
Learning how to handle a stick is a step on the path to adulthood. An adult has rights involving dangerous objects, and responsibilities with regard to taking care of them. That’s what belonging to society means—your freedom ends where my nose begins. We have to live together, and be considerate. I used the example of stick to point out other obligations to our fellow man. Don’t stop and play in the middle of the sidewalk impeding people who are rushing to work. Don’t talk loudly when somebody else is on the telephone. And lastly, don’t poke anybody with that stick! But without the stick he wouldn’t learn.
Read More: 20 Things You Can Do Instead Of Playing Video Games
And here I thought it was civilized… provided the boys are taught proper stick swordplay. 🙂
Maybe this could all be summarized by saying “tell the fembots to shut the hell up.
Good. Needs a little more gentlemanly profanity however. 😉
For Christmas, I gave my kids rubber band gun rifles that I made in my workshop. They love them, and I have enjoyed watching liberal neighbors try to control their disapproval, knowing that I won’t tolerate bullshit. Fuck them. My kids will not grow up to be sissies and will rule the little pussies they are raising.
Hehe..I’ve been teaching my 9 year old son how to light with a longsword since he was 6. He kicks ass with sticks now.
My friends and I used to use those toy lightsabers at that age. I don’t know how many we broke pretending we were Jedi, slaughtering one another and then jumping back up to do it again.
We had wooden toy swords that were bought at a local arts festival. You would play with those things till they broke and your parents bought you new ones the next year. Now that same festival banned the sale of any type of child’s weapon including a manual “air” gun that could shoot a cork maybe 10 feet. Sad state of affairs these days.
I am tempted to go to the park and do some testing cutting with my son. It will be worth it to watch the shitlibs piss themselves in ragefear at a 9 year old cutting stuff with a 4 foot long sharp blade.
At Disney world my brothers and I got lightsabers and fought each other back at the hotel. Gathered a small crowd. Fun times.
Don’t get me started on the censorship on boy’s toys. No wonder our boys are growing up become weak feminine men!
Most men today can’t even take a punch on the shoulder during a play fight!
What surprises me is how cool Nerf guns are now. A bunch of kids got some at a recent Holiday party and I think us adults ended up playing mostly with them chasing women around shooting them in the arse. The wives and GFs did that thing where they acted they were not pleased but totally loved it.
Toy guns used to look like guns. Now it’s hard to find any that look like anything but cheap, brightly colored plastic.
Of course, with a kid’s vivid imagination or a bit of spray paint, it works great.
I don’t like it but get why you can’t find a kid’s gun that looks like a gun. Cops are too trigger happy these days. When I was a kid my BB gun looked just like my Dad’s .22 rifle. Different times though. Good thing kids have imaginations and can make these air powered nerf guns just about the same. And yes once again don’t like this is the reality, but it is.
Few years back I bought one of those fully-automatic ones with a 20 dart clip. Fekkin sweet.
Don’t run with that pointed stick,you’ll put your eye out!
Putting eye out builds character!
Then you can get a cool eye patch!
at least once!
Remember lawn darts from the 80’s? You know the game that got banned because essentially you were throwing a 10 lb metal spike with fins trying to hit a hoop target? I was also 7 and had a real bow and arrow and a blow gun. We would take those out and shoot them at trees. In Boy Scouts we learned how to fletch arrows with real stone arrowheads and actually shoot them. When hiking I would carry an actual real survival knife. After turning 12 it was sometimes my turn to carry the shotgun which we were fully trained in using in case of a wild animal attack. Camping – us 13 year olds made the fire while dads drank beer and pitched the tents. I also learned how to drive (illegally) when I was 14, but no one cared. People would just say “well what if one of your parent’s had an emergency and you had to take them to the hospital”. Do kids these days even know what capture the flag is? We used to play it at night, put on military camo we got from the local army navy, put on black face and play it all night long. Mt. Dew fueled us until the sun came up. When we got older and had minimum wage jobs we even bought radios and signaling flashlights. My God I am glad I was not born 10-15 years later.
My generation is where it really went downhill.
What is your generation?
Yeah I remember those lawn darts! And fighting with sticks? That was when we were like 5. By age 8 or so we would have BB gun wars. Snowball fights in the winter, sometimes dipping them in water for extra punishment. Apple fights in the fall. I got my first real gun (a 22) when I was 12. My cousin gave it to me. Oh and I got my first speargun when I was like ten.
And who remembers Evel Knievel? We were all about seeing how many garbage cans we could jump our bikes over. Knocked out my front teeth crashing a bike. Actually knocked out my baby front teeth crashing a toboggan into a tree!
And capture the flag! Yeah we played that every night in the summertime. Good times.
Ah, 12. Male relatives handed all manner of firearms to me, letting me shoot until my arms and shoulder couldn’t take it anymore. 14, they did the same thing with beer and I learned to drink (illegally), but no one cared.
Blow guns were great. Especially when you shot your buddy, but swore up and down it was an accident. Blow guns weren’t so great when he returned the favor 6x harder.
That reminds me of when pops finally let me shoot his Winchester 300 mag. I will never forget the recoil that knocked me onto my ass, bruised my shoulder, and helped me become that much more of a masculine man.
You had a proper upbringing!
JARTS are actually from the 1970’s, they were long banned by the 1980’s.
I still have my parent’s former JARTS set down in the basement. My son and his friends have played it in the backyard before.
They’re awesome! teaches you the REAL meaning of “heads up!!!!!!!!”
He and his buddies videoed the event and then showed a bunch of people around school in order to troll them into clucking their tongues. Heh. He’s also been known to go with a buddy to Planet Fitness and try and be a “lunk”.
wots a lunk?
According to Planet Fitness, it’s any male weight lifter who actually a) lifts strenuous weights and dares to make a sound or b) somebody who actually takes fitness seriously and doesn’t give others slack to be fatasses. He was shooting for option A.
Planet Fitness actually advertises against “lunks” and has alarms set up that go off if you dare lift more than 20 pounds and go “Uhhh” at a normal speaking volume.
Ridiculous….
I guess they’re more of a treadmill farm for overweight women?
Is it only males?
Deep dark secret – I used to work for pf when I was let go of my job. As short term as it was – worst experience in my life. I wanted to file a class suit due to poor treatment of employees. Ended up getting fired. Anyhow – I don’t recall the lunk alarm specifically being that sexist
It should be called Prison Fitness.
I play every summer with my set, lots of fun. Just an FYI though, they were banned in 1988, Google it.
Arrows are fletched with feathers.
Stop it you guys…some of us had over protective paranoid parents, yay for a boring sheltered (early)life.
Man that sounds fun, my childhood in England was much less exciting. We still did the whole carrying a big stick and adventuring thing though, but only when I was really young (maybe 5-8,5-10 years old)
Definitely teach your sons how to recognize poison ivy before you let them go out.
Getting whipped while play-fighting smarts, but if they used poison ivy the welts are obscene. You might as well have rolled around in the damn stuff.
amen about the poison ivy…..I learned the hard way at 41…..
Some folks aren’t allergic. My mother isn’t, I am very slightly, but my middle bro breaks out even if its even in the wind.
My 5 year old has a stick in one hand and a ball of Plasticine in the other for most of his free time, usually out in the road with a pack of other 5 year olds. That’s when he’s not racing up and down on his bicycle.
American schools kick out bart simpson for shooting a slingshot these days. Fucking hippies who attended woodstock back in the day are school principals ruining kids lives.
Kids, especially boys, need risk carrying activities in order to grow up and understand what is real risk behavior. It’s one thing to fall down on the playground when you are 6 and have your skinned knee heal in 3 days then become a 16 year old thinking you can play tackle football because everyone gets a trophy only to get your spine broken in the process. Same thing goes with drinking. If you have a few beers in the woods and fall down hurting yourself or getting hung over that is one thing. If you never have that experience though you think you can house an entire bottle of vodka at a frat party because you know no limits and end up in the grave. We have unlearned more about society then what we have learned in the last 100 years and are going to be sad because of this unfortunate turn of events.
“Speak softly and carry a big stick”
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Interesting read. I can certainly see where you’re coming from with regards to the societal pressures on parents in raising their children. Although I’m not entirely sold on the idea of violence being such a crucial benchmark in developing any child I still appreciate your write up and am thankful to hear an alternative opinion. Thank you sir.
I own a Japanese wooden sword called a sunuke bokken. Sunuke wood comes from the isu tree in Japan and is rare, nigh indestructible and a prized collection amongst those who practice Kendo. Feminists will have to pry this wooden “stick” from my cold dead hands before I ever surrender it!
My favorite part: “Do kids even know what a stick is anymore?”
exactly what came to mind when I saw the title! well done!
When I was 11 my friend and I were playing with some swords we had made from timber we had appropriated from a building site. Two much older and larger boys came over to us, one of them a notorious bully. He demanded our swords, and when I said no, made a grab for me. I hit him with my sword with all my strength, catching him across the hand and splitting it open. He ran screaming and crying. Weeks later he found me and beat the crap out of me, but I think we both learned a valuable lesson that day.
To always carry a stick?
Sadly impractical. I learned sticks can be jolly useful, he learned they can be bloody painful. He was 16 at the time and a complete asshole. Grew up to be a cop and still a complete asshole.
My elementary school nemesis, Nathan, was a year older than me. We got in more a few scrapes, as I recall. He was really big for his age.
Later, we ended up to going the same private high school, played on the same soccer team, shared the same car pool. We even went to a Rush concert together. But I never forgot the dickhead he used to be.
You just know that dickhead is still in there somewhere.
It would take a while to find it. He’s pushing close to 300 pounds now, and it ain’t muscle.
lol excellent.
We’ve been invited to a kids birthday party this weekend for a boy who turns 6. I heard his mother has him in ballet with his older sister. I am stopping tonight on the way home and buying him a dart gun as a present. Will suggest to the parents they take him out of ballet and get him into martial arts.
Ballet doesn’t necessarily have to turn him into a fag, though it depends on the environment it’s taught in.
If he’s in ballet, he’ll certainly get the message that it’s OK to be gay. Of course, he’ll hear that from every quarter in today’s world. No problem for the majority who know they are straight, or the small minority in whom it is evident even as young as six that they are swish. They will be what they are. Problem is for that confused segment in the middle, size unknown, who tend to move whichever direction they are pushed.
Red pill them young and early, as soon as they can chew. When they’re done with tittie, “ptooey”, it’s sticks and bats. No more milk moustache.
How many straight male ballet dancers have you met in your life?
Hmm. Yeah.
how many GAY ones do YOU know? Hmmmmmmm
This guy had twelve years of ballet.
http://www.patrickswayze.net/Movies/dirty3.jpg
Also Baryshnikov.
http://www.chicagonow.com/candid-candace/files/2013/10/Mikhail-Baryshnikov-Photo-by-Mark-Seliger-2013.jpg
I’ve heard there are actually more straight male professional ballet dancers than gay ones. Somebody should do a study.
I’m also suspicious of the “gay”-ing of anything these days. It seems to me that there’s a concerted push to ghetto-ize straight males such that the only thing we “do” as far as current culture is concerned is drink beer, hoot at girls and watch football. Profession after profession and art after art have been cordoned off as “gay territory” with very little actual evidence, such that if you’re straight you’re not even supposed to *think* about those pursuits or you’ll be labeled “gay”.
Examples: Dance (as you note), cooking, art, music, dressing stylishly, etc.
Ballet has gone the way of broadway musicals and fashion industry, if a man is straight the burden of proof is on him.
Wouldn’t be surprised. Get to put their hands all over pretty girls.
Oh god I’m sounding like my grandfather…
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Swayze had the moves but not the Red pill. You need both. He died in 09 of cancer after one of the longest hollywood marriages (75-09) to his petite blonde wife Niemi. It was a strange ‘Hollywood’ marriage where his wife was a controlling psycho bitch. She ordered which movies he could play in and then she had affairs with both men and women behind his back. She was like a Hillary. A lot of that going around in tinseltown. Swayze was more the stoic but was also a white knight and wouldn’t punch back or just outright bitchslap/oj on her. Notice how the Clintons are still married? Marriage is nothing without the patriarchal HAMMER laid down first. Swayze did get ‘hands on’ with plenty of starlets in dancing scenes but he eventually had to answer to the control freak witch Niemi. Bill Clinton is in the same boat. He’s just as much a kept dog by the witch Hillary.
So as for the ballet with Swayze, you get to stick your thumb in plenty of pussy but so does a gynocologist. You still need to know the game and the true nature of what you’re sticking your thumb into. And you need red pill and frame to sort out and remove yourself from the demonic psycho bitches from hell that latch onto the backs of men like Swayze and onto others like Robin Williams.
I’ve always wondered about the ‘male cheerleaders’ too. They do as much if not more crotch lifting on athletic females than the ballet partners do. They’re the most athletic in my opinion and seem to get the most ‘hands on’ and ‘smelly thumb’ on their women, and they get to do it with a much higher volume of smoking bitches. I used to think that a ‘male cheerleader’ without game and red pill is either a dead man or gay. I doubt there are any without game these days. Every man needs red pill, especially those men who deal with physically demanding athletic women in gymnastic suits. Very few male cheerleaders are actually gay these days I’ve heard. They’re in the game.
http://img1.izismile.com/img/img8/20151029/640/funny_picdump_1088_640_12.jpg
George W Bush on the other hand was a male cheerleader in some elite prep school. I can’t find any pics of George Bush crotch lifting female cheerleaders, but whatever they say about male cheerleaders, they still have an awful lot of ‘hands on’ with the chicks. Thumbs up.
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When you’re as intimately physical with the opposite sex in a normal working capacity as are the male/female cheerleaders, it seems you cross a bridge and the sheer amount of exertion of the male/female bodies exercising in tandem, that is to say that once you’re all in her manually and physically in a challenging physical sport, then she’s all into you and sex is a natural progression (I once spied a male/female cycling duo riding an expensive ‘tandem’ bike all dressed in colorful team gear. They stopped and screwed in the bushes standing up, wiped and then continued on their merry way. Like cracking their knuckles at the gym). It becomes part of the interaction. There’s often a lot of kissing between the male/female cheerleader teams so the sex naturally comes with the territory. With the sweat and the exertion, the pheromones win. Sex on the side is part of the game it seems and that’s how they put on a good show. Kind of like nuns and priests running their exclusive shop. A smacking kiss is like a handshake for pulling off a good routine. Those chicks are butter in your hands.
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And these aren’t the team ballplayers mind you. While fronting as the team’s support crew, these are the dirty dogs that spot the female cheerleader’s most difficult routines requiring heavy lifting, 2-3 girls at a time.
https://cambridgecheerleading.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/cheer_lift.png
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The male cheerleaders are an exclusive club where you have to work your way in and work your way up, like the players. I’ve ran approaches on cheerleaders when I saw them in the college club, but they’re pretty tight with their clique of players and especially their male thumblifters. The players get to thumb the eye of the opponent but the male cheerleader gets to stinkythumb the female cheerleaders on the regular. Rainy day, happens all the time. They get pretty tight from working out.
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Most male cheerleaders aren’t gay. But they all are low ranking males. Their role is to support the women who support the higher ranking males
And while physical contact is better than no contact when trying to sexualize any relationship, it’s really not that much of an advantage because the male cheerleaders are literally below the women.
Compare that to a non gay figure skater I knew. The girls did not outrank him and they were a couple and physical by default. He fucked everyone of his partners
I have to agree with you on the ‘support’ role observation. Granted. Agreed. But one must also agree that today’s male cheerleaders are no one’s bitch by far. Not like the beta provider mules. Male cheerleading is seen as a frivolous sport by outsiders, but the ‘outsiders’ aren’t privvy to go where the male cheerlehder goes, places that are off limit ‘turf’ for many players even. How many football players get to break protocol, step aside and do THIS?
http://www.totalprosports.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/a2.jpg
Those two aren’t even doing a routine. They’re just farting around while the football players are on the benches doing their own farting around, rearranging their balls in their cups, removing their cleats and annoying bunched socks, cracking their toes whilst picking the lint balls from in between and then finally smelling their own finger. Meanwhile across the field, what does the male cheerleader’s finger smell like? Right! And while the football players have their eyes affixed like robots on their coaches, you can see who has the henhouse lounge position filled. It’s a made position for any bodybuilding PUA if you ask me. Or maybe they’re red pill minded and demand only the best trophy to breed with. Well there you go. First dibbs.
The male cheerleading sport is all about ‘hands on’ and first pick for many well schooled men who largely have bigger aspirations (Bush jr). To go ‘pro’ as a male cheerleader beyond collegiate level is rediculous. A pipe dream. It’s only a side sport in college for a few competitive athletic guys who work their way in. Take for example a finance or engineering major who is built and who has some social aptitude. No better a circle than the ‘cheerleaders’ to work out, screw, bag a trophy and get semester credit all in one. Skip the 2am bar scene where the piss wasted and out of shape used leftovers float around in a sausage fest. Skip the thirsty crowds. Keep a clean normal schedule with guaranteed smoking bitches for breakfast and studies/lectures in the afternoon. Be the real champion.
I still don’t know why George W married a librarian. I guess 1960s ‘glee’ was where you stick in your thumb and pull out a plum. And Jeb . . . whooh! . . . “memeep” (a word female cheerleaders find funny). And Jeb said “what a good boy am I”
The college cheerleaders often land themselves top tier providers and end up being bred out the ass. One NFL ex cheerleader Cowboys Stephane Scholz went on to marry a Dallas plastic surgeon and then crank out seven offspring.
http://www.dfwchild.com/images/features/dal-Q&A-web.jpg
She now does her own manuals on parenting and breastfeeding. You heard it right.
Alright Graham, This one is way better than your car seat essay! Definitely can relate to this one, I’m 39 and I remember my friends and I almost killing each other with anything we could find…sticks, the little potato looking things that grow on vines down here in Florida, BB guns, bottle rockets, eggs, if you could throw it or hit somebody with it, we used it! Building forts in the woods, capture the flag, almost daily fights after school, those were the days.
Thanks. Writing is a crapshoot. I’m glad for the audience and the obligation to think my positions through.
M80s, silver tubes, and wrist rockets! Classic.
Up in tall fir country where I grew up we’d throw wet fir cones (we called them pine cones) – tight, dense, and pointy, unlike the broad leafy pine variety, as hard as we could at each other for hours at a time. Many stinging welts and tired shoulders.
These pine cone wars would happen a few times a week. More accurately, these were mere battles in a 10-year long war involving skirmishes among both friends and enemies involving ‘pine’ cones, dirt clods, rocks, and all other matters of warfare.
Blood was spilled on the regular, but it was nothing compared to the grinding angst and psychological dissonance boys live under these days.
When struck by boredom, the older kids, young adults really, would occasionally chase us down and throw us around just to remind us of the hierarchy. Your head had to be on a swivel. Even a simple game of football in the field would always include a contingency/escape plan. And someone always had to be lookout when making a new fort.
Sometimes the older guys would troll the country roads in their barracudas, novas, mustangs, and other old hot-rods hoping to catch us on our bikes with nowhere to run. Taking pop shots at us on our bikes with BB guns was probably the highlight of their reign.
Neighborhood tribes were the norm. Farm field kids vs woods kids. Your house determined your clan. There was no way around it. To this day, when my brother and I reminisce, those kids are remembered by name and by tribe. If we forgot their name it would be “that dopey shithead from the woods who was always with Erik”.
Truth and blood. Often, you learn the former through the latter. Deny the former and it will be your blood in perpetuity. Case in point: the slow, life-draining drip upon which the progressive vampires feed, leaving empty shells of men devoid of their God-given spirit and masculine energy.
Hail the Field crew. We were always better stock than those Forest queers.
I have to say, I really, really enjoyed this
The same kids whose parents ban anything that looks like a weapon are retreating into the most ultraviolet videogames imaginable. It’s just about a schizophrenic state of affairs.
After retiring from the navy my grandfather briefly worked as the Principal of a high school. While there an uppity senior started giving him lip. They agreed to a fair fight that finished which ended with the lad nursing a broken arm.Those few minutes of comeuppance taught him more about respect, humility, and discipline than 12 years of schooling had instilled in him beforehand. As ironic as it is that the cult of the universal wants to take away something as universal as sticks, even that won’t be enough to turn boys into girls. With that being the case it’s never too late to turn them into men.
When I was at University there was a huge Irish guy who did pretty much what he wanted.You had to suck it up and pretend that it was a huge joke. One night we were in a bar run by a rather overweight guy called Cyril who was in his late 50s. The Irish guy grabbed Cyril, who with incredible speed threw a punch. The Irish guy was knocked unconscious. He broke his arm on the way down. Turned out Cyril had been a paratrooper and a former British Army boxing champion. Sometimes life hands out valuable and very effective learning experiences.
I have been making wooden swords for my sons and the kids in my family for a number of years. I have attempted to sell them, but often parents aren’t interested in buying their boys a wooden weapon, likely because it’s too sturdy and can actually do some harm if you smack someone with it. That being said I have began to drop small wooden swords in some of the parks near my house along with a note that encourages someone to take it, in hopes that some young boys, out with dad for a stroll, will come across it and be allowed to keep it. Boys need swords, sticks, play guns and time outside. They even need the opportunity to hurt other boys (not brutally, but you get the drift) and to be hurt themselves. It builds character. Damn stupid feminists and damn stupid fathers who back down and wimp out when their sons want such things and they back down when mom protests. Good luck learning to stand up to bullies using feelz. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/e1342069df09c1bacf93338588a04d18c2689a12c4ea34043c25d25f528a345a.jpg
Heh, I like the symbol.
Thanks. Its the first letter of my last name turned into a kind of alchemic rune. It will look much nicer once I have a brand 3d printed.
That idea of dropping the wooden swords in parks and things is really clever. Will have to remember that one
Make it …Arthurian
Raise by single mother, I was afraid of the kid with the stick :/, I fear for my eyes.
I remember riding bikes with little flags with sharp points and playing “Cavalry”. Such fun.
When I was younger we lived in the country and me and my brother both had ATVs, machetes and BB guns. Would spend all day in the woods building forts and shooting birds.
Carrying around sticks in the woods is how I grew up ,its sad to see boys today can’t enjoy what we enjoyed
As a child I knew there were certain things I was allowed to do at home that I wasn’t at school. Fighting with sticks is a good example. Also running around in woods.
FHRITP
When I was a kid, I used to get into physical fights with other kids all the time and we be back to square as a friend the next day…
But now these days, you see kids online making some comments and claiming to get “bullied” and ending over friendship and burning bridges like that, that quick.
My friends and I used to run around the neighborhood shooting each other with airsoft guns when we were little( I’m 24 now).
Now, doing the same thing would result in you being shot, arrested, etc.
We all still have both of our eyes, all of our fingers, and are not gender fluid.
Strange.
Insightful article. Enjoyed that. Reminded me of something…
When I was growing up there was a saying, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.”
I find a lot of these younger generations have lost the ability to not be so easily offended by mere words. Though indeed powerful, and not without consequence depending on the manner in which they are used, I find myself having to remind them to relax a bit and remember that: they’re just words.
Thus, the reason why sticks and stones must be used far more responsibly.
🤔