A Hard Lesson To Learn

An Essay

A Hard Lesson To Learn

     I want to preface this piece by pointing out a few facts about my own upbringing that will undoubtedly color my perspective on this subject. Like anybody who has an ounce of intellectual honesty in this world, I need to acknowledge that I, like all human beings, come with my own biases, and these are going to inform how I approach and talk about serious subject matters. To try and say otherwise would be the height of dishonesty on my part, and I’d rather be honestly wrong than dishonestly get somebody on board with what I’m saying.

     First of all, I am the youngest of three sons to my parents. My two older brothers, Newton and Colin, had almost as much of an influence on who I ultimately became as a person as our parents did. In some aspects, they had even more of an influence, to be accurate. If not for my oldest brother Newt’s encouragement, I might not have gotten into a fascination with the genres of fantasy and horror. If not for my brother Colin’s insistence, I might never have taken up the study of martial arts. If not for both of them, I might never have gotten into tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons.

     And if not for our rowdiness as kids growing up, involving ourselves in the games we and our circles of friends played, I might not have come to appreciate the potential violence of the world and the consequences of certain actions undertaken by myself and those around me.

     This is not some roundabout way of saying ‘Boys will be boys’, because I think we’ve all seen just how well that goes over when it goes too far. If you carry that phrase around in your head and support it without questioning exactly what it can lead to, you end up with some pretty horrific results. However, there are certain aspects of masculine childhood and adolescence that, if you deny the reality of them, you end up with even worse circumstances. Allow me to extrapolate.

     One of the games my brothers and I, and our friends, all got around to playing in various iterations in our youth was generally dubbed ‘War’. This was played in various ways; squirt guns, BB guns, pellet guns, NERF guns, paintball guns, etcetera. Laser Tag got in there for a little while, until we all realized that if you just turned off the target thing you wore on your chest, you literally couldn’t die, and cheating became not only rampant, but part of the strategy of playing a neighborhood round of the game. I think that’s why I prefer the installation-style of the game as portrayed in programs like ‘How I Met Your Mother’; there are rules, artificial environments staged for close quarters combat, and definitive winners and losers.

     Now, let’s start with the painful but very real lessons that were learned over time in measure of importance, from least vital to most vital. Firstly, ‘War’ taught us about teamwork, planning, and how to effectively carry out a mission. The mission itself was simple- ‘kill’ everybody on the other team, if it wasn’t just a free-for-all. Secondly, depending on the type of toy/instrument we were using, ‘War’ taught us about real, physical pain, because getting hit with a BB or pellet on exposed or under-clothed areas hurt like a bitch. Imagine if it was a real bullet! NERF darts never really hurt that much, unless you were being shot at point-blank range, but even then, those little suckers could really sting if you got hit in just the right way.

     The next lesson of import that ‘War’ taught us was that there are, in conflicts of any sort, real winners and losers. The ‘winners’ are the ones who don’t have all of their team members ‘killed’. The ‘losers’ are, well, all dead. The stakes are obviously not real in a childhood game of ‘War’, but the lessons imparted are very, very real, and whether we want to admit it or not, these are vital lessons to learn.

     And then, of course, there’s the very last lesson that games of ‘War’ taught us as children, and it was a subtle lesson, one that isn’t quite so obvious when watching a bunch of idiot kids play these sorts of games: at the end of the day, no matter how many times you ‘died’, or how many ‘kills’ you scored, nothing good was accomplished by shooting at a bunch of other people. Sure, it was a good workout, we got fresh out and got outdoors, and socially interacted with our fellow children, yes. These are all good things, of course. But when you parse through all of that, what good actually came of taking these faux weapons and running yourselves ragged and pelting each other with bits of metal/plastic/paint? The answer is: none. The shooting itself accomplished nothing of value.

     But the positive lessons of teamwork, of planning, of implementing strategies, these are things that can be carried over into other pursuits of a positive, productive nature. Recognizing where people have specific skill sets or advantages over other members of the team became a key leadership skill, one that my brother Colin had in spades. My buddy AJ couldn’t cobble together a plan of any sort if you gave him a genie that could grant him one wish, for strategic mastery in a small scale environment; but boy howdy, that kid could run circles around people in a woodland on his own, and you’d never even hear him coming. That skillset served him well when he eventually went on to play high school and then college football.

     Additionally, these games of War got out a lot of our brewing adolescent male energy and aggression. They served as a conduit to release that pent up hostility, and to do so in a way that didn’t leave behind corpses. I know being blunt about this may seem untoward, but let’s face facts- if you don’t give young or adolescent males an outlet for their simmering aggressions, they will either internalize them to the breaking point (suicide), or externalize them to horrific effect (massacre). This is not excuse making, folks, this is biological and neurochemical reality. No amount of glad-handing or soft language is going to change the hardwired, evolutionary reality that boys need something to channel these energies toward.

     If any of this strikes you as ‘backward’ or ‘knuckle-dragging’, I want you to consider the following point: per FBI criminal statistics and studies from the Secret Service on the phenomenon of school and mass public shootings since 2000, only 3 of the perpetrators were involved in some form of agricultural labor, either as members of a farming family or rural community with farm work as a key component. These young men and boys, involved in raw, simple manual labor, which yields a tangible reward come time for harvest or collection, have a necessary outlet for their physical energies and aggressions. It’s difficult to feel the need to take up a weapon and go hurt a bunch of people when you’ve got chores to be done, animals to tend to, crops to take care of.

     Now, this is not an aside to appeal to some kind of return to ‘the simple life’, as it were. What it is, however, is a demonstration of the same sort of point I made with the suburban/urban games of ‘War’ that kids like my brothers and I, and our friends, indulged in- that if you give boys and adolescent males a physical pursuit to engage in, it decreases the likelihood that they’re going to engage in some act of horror that plunges the greater society into shadow.

     How often do we see boys discouraged from roughhouse play nowadays? How many ‘zero tolerance’ policies have to absolutely fail before we finally recognize that they just don’t work? At all? Do you know why there’s so few shootings in the Republic of Ireland among young men? It’s largely because, as a culture, from a very young age, they allow their boys to punch each other stupid, work out their shit afterward with some gruff but heartfelt words, and then move on with their lives. Here, we’re so concerned that nobody ever comes to blows or harsh words that we stifle people to the point where, because every OTHER outward expression of rage has been bottled up on a societal level, that by the time someone does take action, they’ve been left with only one level to chose from- the lethal one.

     If you take this to mean that I’m advocating for letting young boys get rough with each other, then yes, I absolutely am. Because when you learn early on that you might lose such an encounter, it leaves you with a healthy respect for the damage that can be caused when you or someone else loses control of themselves. If you let kids have a go at one another early on, or play ‘War’ out in the woods or the fields nearby, they’re historically and statistically less likely to escalate later on, because they’ll have gotten that aggression out of their system, and learned the harsh truth of the world, that violence doesn’t leave any ‘winners’ behind. In the real world, when violence takes place, even if you didn’t take a single punch, you are left winded, tired, and weary from the dump of adrenaline through the system.

     Now, there are, of course, some real psychopaths and sociopaths in the world, who are going to take a kind of sick thrill from even that exhaustion at the end of the day. I’m not denying that those people are out there. However, if you reduce the pool of potential psychos by letting off some of their aggressions early on, and learn the bitter truths of losing and getting clipped with a BB or paintball or a punch to the nose from another kid, you might end up with fewer of these mass damage incidents.

     And as for the kids who are bullied relentlessly, like so many of these mass damage shooters were, let me ask, were any of them offered outlets for their bitterness? I don’t just mean therapy or psychoactive drugs, which certainly have their places if properly administered and monitored. I mean, were any of them perhaps given a punching bag and a pair of gloves, and told ‘Go ahead and let it out, kid’? I can almost guarantee that no, they weren’t. Instead, they were told to talk to someone about their feelings, to do some journaling, to let the harsh words fall on deaf ears. Kids don’t do that, though; they are bundles of raw nerves and feeling, especially adolescent boys. They need to do something with that energy, with those feelings, they need a target. A punching bag seems like a much better one to aim them toward than a room or school full of potential victims.

     I say all of this because there’s another lesson here, one that we seem to be flat-out ignoring as a society: young and adolescent boys are largely rudderless in the current environment we’ve cultivated here in the West. We’ve told them their aggressive energies are ‘toxic’, that their sense of self-worth should be derived from softer, gentler pursuits. We’ve tried to deny them their primal essence as biological descendants from species far more savage and brutal than our society allows, stripped them of every viable outlet they might otherwise have. We have tried to soften something that cannot be softened- the biological/neurochemical urge to aggression.

     And if we don’t course correct, these sorts of things are just going to keep happening, no matter how much we try to restrict the tools of aggression at their disposal.