Could the culture of entitlement and helicopter parenting put an end to war?
From the Guardian’s Jerusalem blogger Seth Freedman:
A bus stop in Ashkelon became the stage for an extraordinary pantomime over the weekend as a stand-off erupted between a group of female soldiers, their parents, and their IDF commanders. Citing the army’s apparent lack of concern for their safety, the rookie soldiers refused to return to their base in Zikim, near Gaza, which was targeted in a recent Kassam attack by Palestinian militants.
The soldiers, who have only been in the army for two weeks, decided that their superiors had not done enough in terms of fortifying the base after the carnage last month. With the backing of their parents they decided to defy orders and stage a mini-demonstration protesting their plight. Appeals by army top brass to return to base and air their grievances through the proper channels were met with outright refusal by the soldiers, forcing their commanders to threaten to jail them all unless they complied with their instructions.
[…]
For the average 18-year-old enlistee into the IDF’s ranks, there is an almost seamless transition from the final year of senior school to the first day spent in the confines of an army barracks. After a childhood spent in the (relatively) warm bosom of parents and teachers in their local community, the shock to the system of life in the army is understandably often met with resistance by the soldiers.
Throw into the mix one plutzing Jewish mother for every fresh-faced young rookie, and it is easy to see how the whole commander-soldier system can break down when parents are so willing to get involved to defend their offspring to the hilt. In a country where almost every parent sends their child off to war to defend their homeland, familial intervention in army affairs is often treated with almost reverential restraint by commanders – but only up to a point, as the Zikim soldiers found out.
If every mother in countries that’re prosecuting wars of aggression did this there’d be a sudden outbreak of peace – although of course in many countries it would merit an armed response. It is after all, strictly speaking, a mutiny.
But would conscripts shoot their own mothers? Some might, probably more than we mothers would like to think, but imagine the worldwide furore. Matrcide is a universal no no.
Because so well developed is the American sense of entitlement, scenes like this one in Israel, where all able-bodied young are conscripted, might be a foretaste of what could happen if a US draft were instituted.
So let’s call one now. Can you imagine the reaction if these parents’ precious darlings were drafted?
Even their children level the charge at the baby boomers: that members of history’s most indulged generation are setting new records when it comes to indulging their kids. The indictment gathered force during the roaring ’90s. A Time/CNN poll finds that 80% of people think kids today are more spoiled than kids of 10 or 15 years ago, and two-thirds of parents admit that their kids are spoiled. In New York City it’s the Bat Mitzvah where ‘N Sync was the band; in Houston it’s a catered $20,000 pink-themed party for 50 seven-year-old girls who all wore mink coats, like their moms. In Morton Grove, Ill., it’s grade school teachers handing out candy and yo-yos on Fridays to kids who actually managed to obey the rules that week. Go to the mall or a concert or a restaurant and you can find them in the wild, the kids who have never been told no, whose sense of power and entitlement leaves onlookers breathless, the sand-kicking, foot-stomping, arm-twisting, wheedling, whining despots whose parents presumably deserve the company of the monsters they, after all, created.
A whole army of Private Benjamins. I love it when a plan comes together.
With a universal draft of overindulged teens I could indulge my schadenfreude at the little horrors getting their comeuppance in boot camp whilst at the same time relishing the total unpreparedness of the military machine for a confrontation with a shrieking horde of lawyered-up, indulgent boomer parents.
Perhaps raising children to be self-centered and mollycoddled, and then drafting them, has the potential to end war as we know it. Neato.
