Should I Eat a Good Breakfast?
January 5, 2012 in Blogs
Decades ago I participated in a folk song gathering at a local church elsewhere; the assistant pastor thought that he could connect with teenagers by getting together to sing fifties-era folk songs with seventies-era kids, but I liked to sing and I liked learning songs and I wasn’t as picky about them then as I am now, so I went. I only remember fragments of them now. One of those fragments, though, was a clever song about being old, and in one verse it ran:
…I get up each morning and read the obits.
If I’m not there, I know I’m not dead,
So I eat a good breakfast and go back to bed.
Well, I got up this morning because my youngest was off work yesterday and came home ostensibly to see us but also to do his laundry, and he needed a ride to work half an hour away when the ride is smooth, but when he didn’t make it to the car until after six-thirty I knew that not only were we going to have to deal with the slick roads from the overnight dusting of snow, we were also going to catch all the school buses we would have avoided ten minutes earlier. I did get him there before too late, although not exactly on time, and I returned home and have been trying to figure out whether to start my day or get another few hours of sleep. While I’ve been trying to figure this out, I’ve tackled a good part of what constitutes starting my day.
That includes having uploaded today’s Examiner temporal anomalies article, Blackadder Back & Forth part 4: Elizabeth, in which the real question involves the impact on history when William Shakespeare abandons his literary career and instead invents the ballpoint pen.
I did not read them today, but then, he did not write them today, and it’s too early for him to have added anything today; but Eric Ashley continues to provide fiction bits for our enjoyment, and there are two more since I last posted on Monday. Practise Bits: Dialogue is a conversation in which one person is trying not to be persuaded to become involved in some battle on behalf of another. Practise Bits: Civilization raises the interesting notion that it is somehow civilized for men to go to war and women to stay behind. I wonder what the Israeli army thinks of that idea, and think that perhaps Eric needs to explore it a bit more clearly–he seems to assume that the reader will understand why that arrangement is more civilized, and I’m not certain I do.
So now I’m trying to decide whether to push forward into the remainder of today’s tasks or strip off some of the clothing I donned for the purpose of braving the pre-dawn cold and crawl back into bed. But I’m not going to decide that before I get this posted, so you’ll just have to try to figure it out.
–M. J. Young
Tadeusz said on January 5, 2012
Nicely insightful about Civilization. I was thinking roughly the same thing.
I did not want to get into lecture mode where I’m not so much writing a story as writing an essay. I’m uncertain how far I can go in that direction.
Actually, the IDF is a good example for my viewpoint. The Israelis are in a desperate situation so they are forced to the less civilized ‘women fight’ position. The more people excluded as legitamate targets of war, the more merciful the war.
JTM said on January 7, 2012
It seems to me that it would be equally civilized to have the same total number of soldiers in a monogender or mixed-gender military.
JohnA1nut said on January 8, 2012
What I read about an attempt at a mixed-gender military is that the men would risk their lives needlessly to protect the women, and when the women got killed, so did morale.
Tadeusz said on January 8, 2012
JTM,
It makes it easier to define women as civilians if they all fit into that class. And in war, according to Clausewitz, even the simple is hard.
Also, women and men are not alike. It is more civilized to put a man in danger than a woman. ‘Women and children first’ is civilization. ‘Shet it, ho!’ ain’t.
M. J. Young said on January 8, 2012
Well, I guess since we’re discussing the issue of women in military, there are a few points to consider.
I don’t remember whether it is in this article or another that Eric notes the “breeding stock” aspect. From a perspective of racial pragmatism, a nation can rebuild its population much more quickly and easily if the women have been protected during the war. As recently as the aftermath of World War I (in which the British lost a million men, the French more than that, the Germans more than that, and the Russians more than that) polygamy was practiced in western nations for one generation to restore decimated populations.
I heard a woman argue that there are some things that a man won’t do to another man, but a woman is less restricted in that regard. I don’t know whether either of those points is true, but I think that there is a degree to which men try to “play war by the rules” and women see it as an all-out no-holds-barred fight to the death. It might become that for men, but it doesn’t usually start there.
What John says about men protecting women is probably true. I was in the grocery store yesterday, and the girl who works the deli counter didn’t have any customers so she was helping the butchers in the meat department who had lines. She happened to get me, which pleased me in part because she spoke English well and some of the men do not. Yet while she was carving my boneless pork loin into one roast and a dozen chops, one of the men insisted on helping her wrap them up even though he was with another customer. She says she gets that all the time, and she’d really rather do it herself, and I would see that the pork she wrapped for me was wrapped better than the pork he wrapped. (It was, incidentally.) But you would get that in a military unit, where the men (particularly young men with young women) would insist on doing for the women instead of paying attention to what they were supposed to be doing. You might also get rivalries among the men for the attentions of the women, which is another layer of distraction. (I don’t know whether you would get the same or similar responses among the women. I think women do have rivalries and make efforts to catch men, but that they approach these differently.)
Besides, if the army is out there protecting us, there really ought to be an “us” they want to protect, and if the army is young men, young women back home are probably the most inspiring group of us.
Finally, Eric is right–there are centuries of statements from many cultures emphasizing as a fundamental principle of a universally shared morality that women should be protected by men. I noticed it in re-reading the appendix in C. S. Lewis’ Abolition of Man yesterday. Lewis makes the point that you can’t prove the fundamental rules of morality, and no one who doesn’t inherently recognize them as valid can’t be shown that they are–they’re more like axioms, the bases on which we build concepts of right and wrong conduct. Protecting the weak is one of them, and perceiving women as among those who need protection is universally part of that.
–M. J. Young
JohnA1nut said on January 9, 2012
Yeah, but there are most certainly things a man will do to a woman that he would never dream of doing to another man.
M. J. Young said on January 9, 2012
And maybe that’s another reason to keep women out of combat.
–M. J. Young