RAISING BOYS? OR RAISING MEN

Recently there have been a lot of articles and opinion columns published about how to raise boys. Apparently girls can raise themselves but boys require extra assistance. As a boy myself I can understand. In addition I also participated in raising a boy. I know we often need additional care and feeding. These published items seem to be in response to the shooting in southern Florida.

I looked at some of them. They seem to hold the opinion that boys are raised as fighters and that is the reason we have problems in this world. My wife concluded that the authors of these pieces seem to think if we didn’t raise fighters, we wouldn’t have fights. The alleged studies that were done come to the conclusion that we need less competition. We shouldn’t have winners and losers, just all winners. Participation trophies for everyone. Nobody loses. All outcomes must be equal regardless of the effort or talent exercised. The need to compete, they conclude, is the reason boys become fighters.

Let’s look at this. Sports teams are taught to fight to win. Aside from sports teams, how about spelling bees? How about science fairs? Then there’s the whole grade thing. Studying hard to earn an A is competition, isn’t it? If we just didn’t have this ugly competition thing we could all be winners, right?

What these authors seem to want is for us all to just “live and let live.” We can all just sit around and sing “Kum Ba Yah.”

Well, I have some harsh news for these authors and their conclusions. To survive in the world, we must be willing to compete. To be successful in any business venture, we must be willing to go the extra mile. Some are going to win, and some are going to lose. Those are the facts.

Beyond business there are any of a number of ways we must be willing to be better than everyone else. Consider North Korea, or Iran. Or how about the entire Muslim Islamist movement. Then there’s Russia. Do you suppose these countries and movements are willing to just throw away their weapons and sit down for a civilized conversation? The reality of the world is that some win and some lose. In many cases the losers just die. In some cases entire countries die.

America was born out of revolution. Courageous individuals were tired of foreign interference and foreign rule and decided to create a country of their own.

These founders wrote a constitution. They made laws to govern this new country. They established a military to defend this new country. The whole thing was a giant gamble, but it worked.

Over the years we have had to defend our country and her principles. Often we have had to remind our own citizens of what is expected of them. From time to time we have even had to remind our own government of the guarantees provided to us by the Constitution and the restraints that document puts on the government.

All of this requires people willing to stand up and sometimes even fight. Success is never guaranteed. People who are educated to believe that they are winners regardless of the situation will surely wind up on the losing side of everything. I’m not just talking about boys here. All Americans have a stake in this country. Successful women are just as important as successful men.

So then, contrary to the opinion of these writers, we should not be raising boys but instead we should be raising men and women. Strong, self assured and self reliant, freedom loving, and prepared to fight for what is right. America is not an accident. We are where we are because people have sacrificed and fought for us. We must all be prepared to take up that fight at all times.

Ron Scarbro

THE RASCAL BEHIND THE TREE

When a tragedy such as the school shooting in Florida occurs there seems to be a need to place blame. Now I am fine with blaming the shooter, but the popular notion is to blame almost everything and everybody else except the shooter. It was reported just today that the blame should fall upon the JROTC program. This was denounced as a war machine. The group, “Code Pink”, has asked that the program be eliminated from our schools. They went further to state the shooter was trained to be a marksman by the US Army in the JROTC program. So then it must be the fault of the Army that this shooter killed all those people. No, morons, it is the fault of the shooter. Not his guns, not his mother, not some societal woe either real or imagined, and most certainly not a program designed to prepare young people for real life.

Why is it that some among us must find a boogie man in every tragedy other than the actual villain who perpetrated the tragedy?

Consider Milwaukee County, Wisconsin. They just sued several major pharmaceutical manufacturers because three hundred thirty-six people died of opioid overdoses in their county last year. Their thinking is that it must be the fault of the supplier of the drugs rather than the abuser of the drugs. Never mind that these drugs are produced to benefit individuals in pain and they are designed to assist in the healing process. No, because some idiots abused the product, the manufacturer must be punished. And subsequently then anyone who actually needs this medication for real pain.

This reminds me of the lawsuits against cigarette manufacturers. Millions of dollars were awarded to plaintiffs for damages real or imagined in an effort to make everybody feel better. Poor bereaved widows and widowers had to have justice. Somebody had to pay.  Here again the thinking seems to be that smokers have no choice but to be controlled by the producers of cigarettes. As a former smoker I can tell you I never had a cigarette jump into my mouth and light itself. No, I made those stupid decisions myself and have no one but myself to blame for it. I can also tell you that, while it took me several years to arrive at the decision, I quit smoking because I believed it was harmful to my health.

What we are talking about is of course, personal responsibility. It has become fashionable to place responsibility on everyone and everything except the actual perpetrator.

Let’s talk guns. I am a gun owner. I have owned guns for most of my life. I use them for hunting, target practice but mostly for protection. Owning guns is my right as an American citizen. How I use those guns could be an issue. I have to be responsible. I have to keep my guns away from children. I never play with them. They are tools for responsible adults. If I don’t use my guns responsibly, then I could and should suffer the consequence of poor decisions.

As a youngster I often heard, “If it wasn’t you and it wasn’t me, then it must have been that rascal behind the tree.” Of course there wasn’t a rascal behind a tree, the rascal was me. It was a way of teaching personal responsibility.

We, as a country, are facing many problems. Most of those problems could be fixed by our just taking responsibility for our actions or our inactions. People born into poverty don’t have to continue their lives in poverty. People who believe they were denied a proper education don’t have to live their lives uneducated. In the final analysis we are all personally responsible for ourselves. There is no rascal behind the tree. Perhaps it’s only thee.

Ron Scarbro

I THINK I WOULD GO WITH THE ALPHA MALE

I saw an interesting item last week. A publication known as The Hollywood Reporter published a piece celebrating the rise of the “Beta Male”. The item was accompanied by pictures of several very feminine looking men with their hands in each other’s pockets. I have no idea what that was all about, but the point of the piece was that masculinity is passé and “metro-sexual” types are taking over. No more aggressive war-like men. From now on everybody will just get along. And we’ll all be “drinking free bubble up and eating rainbow stew.” I’m not making this up.

That got me thinking. President Trump is about to sit down with the dictator of North Korea and negotiate an end of that little country’s nuclear power. The goal of this meeting will be the complete denuclearization of the entire Korean peninsula. Why do you suppose little Kim decided to have a sit down with Trump? Is it because he thought Trump was a weak beta male? Or maybe he got the picture that if he didn’t, his entire country would be turned into radioactive rubble.

I recall the time when a particular alpha male, Ronald Reagan, was elected President. For 444 days before his election Iran had held as hostages 66 members of our consulate in Tehran. Reagan’s inauguration was January 20, 1981 and on that day the hostages were released. All the time they were held, beta male President Jimmy Carter tried to gain their release. He negotiated, begged, pleaded, and even tried a military rescue attempt. Nothing worked. But, on the day of Reagan’s inauguration they were released. Now, why do you suppose that happened? Do you think maybe Iran thought they would get a better deal from Reagan if they just gave us back our citizens? Or do you think maybe if they didn’t, they might be looking down the barrel of weaponry the likes of which the world had never seen? Seems pretty clear to me.

When President Reagan told Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, do you suppose he did so because Reagan was a “beta male”? I think Gorbachev looked into his crystal ball and saw the complete annihilation of several of his cities and thought better of the whole wall thing. Let’s face it. The world respects power and strength and nothing else.

If you had to get into a foxhole, who would you rather have in there with you, John Wayne or Johnny Depp? If you had to get into that same foxhole and had a choice of Donald Trump or Barack Obama, who would you choose?

These scenarios offer a clear choice between alpha and beta males. Personally, I think I would go with the alpha male. How about you?

None of us know how these meetings with North Korea will turn out, but at least we are giving that little punk an opportunity to survive. He either sees the light or he will surely see the darkness.

Last week President Trump announced tariffs on imported steel and aluminum. The main stream media had a fit. Many, some in his own party, screamed that he will just upset our trading partners. Maybe, just maybe, our trading partners will see the same light and come to the understanding that we will no longer be their floor mat. There is a new sheriff in town and he’s an alpha male whether liberal types like it or not. And like I said earlier, personally I think I will go with the alpha male.

Ron Scarbro

DO WE HAVE THE MORALITY TO LIVE AS FREE PEOPLE?

Can a free people govern themselves if they lack morality? George Washington didn’t think so. He went so far as to opine that for our government and our way of living to succeed, we need religion. He believed that without integrity/religion, free people would fail.

I want to talk about integrity. Do you think we have integrity in our politicians? Have you ever wondered how someone making $100,000 a year could wind up as a millionaire after just a few years in Congress? I have. Where did that money come from and what did it buy? What really is a campaign contribution? Is someone buying legislation or just access?

On a personal level, as a very young manager of a private company working in a state capital, I was called upon by the president of that company to deliver a check to a certain politician. I was told this check, a very large check by the way, was to insure that a piece of legislation which served no one but our company, would be brought to a vote and would pass. At the time I worked for a loan company and the legislation allowed us to raise our rate of interest.

The legislation was in fact passed and we did raise our rates and no one was any the wiser. And, no I would not participate in anything like that today. At the time I was very young and thought I was just doing my job.

Watching the news today is a real experience. We see the latest elected official who is being accused of sexual molestation, we see high powered bureaucrats lying to cover themselves for criminal acts. We see politicians lying trying to get elected in order to get in on the gravy train. Where is the integrity? And can our way of life continue to succeed without it?

We are well into a new year. There will be an election this year whereby the House and many in the Senate will face the voters asking for reelection. Have they earned your vote? Have they displayed integrity? Have they put the country first and their party second? Is there any new blood waiting for their turn at the gravy train? These are indeed tough questions and the answers are just as tough.

The voters gave this country a tremendous gift in our last election. We elected a Republican Senate, House, and President and we are just now beginning to see the fruits ripen from that election. We have a serious jurist now in the Supreme Court and the very real possibility of more vacancies in the near future. We have had a great reduction in the number of onerous regulations which has stifled business for many years. We finally got real tax reform. The Obamacare mandate has ended. People will have more money in their pockets. All the while the “anti-Trumpers” are holding nothing back in their efforts to try to de-legitimize this President. The all out attack on Trump and his family is unprecedented. And, so far, nothing has stuck. The Russia collusion fable is going nowhere.

Finally, it seems the entire country is getting a belly full. The constant investigations, bad press, innuendo, and the just outright lies are giving the country a headache. The sky is not falling. Trump is our President and will probably be for yet another term. Get used to it liberals. The people are in charge, not just a few so-called elites in Hollywood or in New York.

How many denizens currently dwelling on the swamp of Washington DC are showing integrity? And how many of those are there because of special interest money and power? And whose side are they really on?

The final question is, do we the people have enough integrity to elect honorable people and hold their feet to the fire? Will our way of living survive?

Ron Scarbro