I have a few words to say about this insidious attitude which seems to be turning this country into a nation of pansies.
Stop whining, stop licking your wounds, stop feeling sorry for yourself.
Don’t be a pansy.
Toughen up. Don’t be a cry baby, don’t play the victim, don’t expect people to feel sorry for you.
We’ve had too much Oprah, too many grief counselors, too much talking about our “pain.” We’ve turned into sniveling narcissists engaged in one giant, nationwide pity party.
How embarrassing.
What makes me think of it is the report that the Army has started a service wide training program on mental-health awareness. Now, I’m all for mental health. I’m all for being understanding and for getting help when you need it. But I notice that mental illness is catching. The more you talk about it, the more people get it.
It’s like one giant placebo effect, a power-of-suggestion phenomenon of self-fulfilling prophecy. If I give a class on the signs of mental stress, people who thought they were perfectly fine suddenly start showing symptoms of mental stress. After a while, you’re going to have a pack of touchy-feely pansies intent on having the world kiss their boo-boo and feel sorry for them. That’s the last thing that the Army needs.
I’m not sure when it started, but in recent years, American society has been emotionally castrated. We’ve become so comfortable with being “in touch with our feminine side” that we act as if it’s the only side. The traditional male approach to emotional stress – to be tough and shake it off – is ridiculed and rejected. Few things seem more personal than our emotions and how we handle them, yet there is widespread intolerance for how many people do that.
We have chosen an affected emotionality that induces and rewards weakness and breakdown. Like a child whose mother comes running when it falls down and skins its knee, contemporary Americans unconsciously see sorrow and emotional upset as ways to become the center of attention and earn sympathy and even celebrity.
In short, you’re nobody until you cry.
Our culture once admired and rewarded toughness. Americans were strong and stoic. They crossed plains and climbed mountains and fought Indians. They won the wars, endured the depressions, survived the diseases. Now they just cry.
The media feeds into it. If there is a storm or a fire or an earthquake, the camera gets stuck in the face of whoever blubbers the loudest. The steady folks who simply set about picking up and going forward don’t make the evening news.
If there is a bad wreck or a fatal fire or some terrible murder, they put the cops and firefighters on TV talking about how emotionally hard it was for them. Which is confusing, because I thought the dead people were the victims.
With the economic downturn, the nightly news is a never-ending parade of whiners and crybabies, each trying to outdo the other in describing how devastated they are by the downturn. We have become so fond of weakness and victimhood that we embrace it and crave it.
“How do you feel?” has become our national obsession.
And now every soldier in Basic Training is going to get schooled on his feelings. I wonder which real soldier skill they would have taught in the time that is now being devoted to group-therapy claptrap. Instead of equipping soldiers better for the rigors of their duty, it weakens them and opens them to difficulties they likely wouldn’t otherwise have had. So-called “experts” should be honest enough to recognize that their prevention of mental stress actually plants the seeds of mental stress.
Humans are creatures who learn. We are pretty much monkey see, monkey do. And when you tell people that they are apt to have emotional pain and disability, they unconsciously rise to the expectation. Having been taught that emotional disability is an expected result of military stress, they respond to military stress with emotional disability.
If on the other hand, a culture or a class teaches people that they are tough, that they can endure difficulty and stress, surprisingly, they are tough and they endure difficulty and stress.
It is vogue today to mock the old ethic of “suck it up and march on.” It is ridiculed as some sort of unevolved, Neanderthal attitude. It actually was a very useful and very kind ethic. It strengthened people for the challenges of their duty.
Why do you suppose our Army has record-high suicide rates today?
It can’t be because of the stress of their duty. While hugely difficult, it is not unusually so. Compared with the warriors of Vietnam, Korea and the Second World War, even multiply deployed soldiers today are not facing anything their predecessors didn’t face. In some ways, the duty of today is less rigorous than that of earlier generations.
Yet those generations had far-lower suicide rates? Why is that? What has changed? Have the soldiers changed? Are they genetically different? Is there some difference in the chemical make up of their brains?
No. Soldiers are soldiers. They haven’t changed. But their culture has. Whereas their fathers and grandfathers went into the service having been raised in a culture that encouraged and admired toughness, the soldiers of today grew up in a world “in touch with its feelings.” It is not the absence of emotional awareness that contributes to these suicides, it is the abundance of it.
When you raise people in a bath of crying Oprah guests and weeping faces on the evening news, when you warn them that they are going to be emotionally brittle, you cannot be surprised if, in fact, they turn out emotionally brittle.
The touchy-feely psychobabble attitude is not the cure, it is the cause. It’s too bad the Army doesn’t realize that, because it is going to do more harm than good.
Society should realize that. Parents should realize that. We are mollycoddling ourselves and turning into a nation of pansies.
