Structure

What we all need is structure. As the summer holidays draw to a close, many parents are silently waiting for the moment when the kids go back to school. Silently waiting for the imposition of structure in their daily lives again. Whether the parent is working or not, kids out of school get crazy for lack of structure.

OK, you may have read that in the Ladies Home Journal, but the lesson has wider applications.... Those detestable cretins in the West Bank elected Hamas -- and are whining and crying about how cruel the rest of the world is not to honor THEIR choice for leading their lives. Silly school kids also whine when they can't stay up late, watch "R" rated movies, IM their friends, and a host of other things -- their choices. Whining Hamas supporters forget that Hamas has as a central tenet the destruction of Israel and the death of its inhabitants. Sorry, but your choice is not acceptable. I heard some moron from the UN yesterday moaning about the embargo and border restrictions choking Gaza to death (she was a Palestinian-born UN official), but never did she point out the simple fact that the people KNEW that when voting for Hamas that the world would impose these sanctions. We told them so and that their ambitions to kill all the Jews was just not going to get a waiver.

I digress -- Hamas HAS imposed structure on the Gaza Strip. All of a sudden people can go outside again without fear of being caught in Fatah/Hamas cross fire. And in a stroke, their lives are easier and the sanctions not as crushing.

Saddam Hussein imposed ... structure. You do things my way or die. Crude, but effective. What is lacking in Iraq right now is precisely that sort of structure. An American soldier has to be nice and polite and inquire whether Ahmad might or might not be a terrorist. Imagine asking your teenager to comply in the same way. Ahmad tells the soldier to commit self-fornication and walks into the "safe base" of his mosque to work on his IED project. Your teen gives you the finger takes your car keys and goes down to the mall. In both cases structure is lacking. In both cases it will likely lead to unwanted results if not criminality.

Structure is the product of realistic thinking -- thorough thinking. And courage of conviction. We punish our children for violating the boundaries formed by the structure laid out for them. But we ignore the violations by our other charges (however unwilling), the Iraqis. Not good thinking. Not very realistic. Pretty stupid, actually. However, given the complete lack of courage of our political base, hardly surprising. Since the wet hand-wringers from the People's Republic of Cambridge can't get it together to impose our laws within the U.S., it is hardly likely that they will sanction the application of sensible policies abroad. If you have illegal aliens crawling around your own country and U.S. Senators supporting their illegal actions and those of their employers, it is not probable that this character will support U.S. troops from doing their job abroad, even though the lack of support can and does cost soldiers their lives.

Dr. Spock's teachings raised an entire generation (it is this generation that has raised the current crop of idiots trying to enter the workforce assuming that they can arrange a meeting with the company president to discuss policy -- even though they are still an intern) and the Spock generation(s) are responsible for the American failure to impose structure throughout our lives. Chaos. We should take care not to harm our kid's psyche. Uh-huh. We should not impose our structure on those hard-working, wild-eyed Islamic extremists. Can anyone see the similarity here? I'd think that our version of structure would be preferable to Saddam's or the likely form of structure from the victorious Shiite or Sunnis. But, if you are on the winning side -- and each group thinks that they will be, the structure for the losers is not really a worry at all.

Can anyone see how failure to impose our laws and structure at home leads to the same bad decisions in foreign policy? Oh, he's not a heroin addict, he's sick, poor thing, He's not an anti-semite, he just needs re-hab. Poor Li-Lo, she's just a confused proto-adult, a victim of our society's pressures. Poor gang-bangers in the ghetto, they are victims of our failure to educate them. IT IS ALL OUR FAULT.

Whose fault exactly? The people allocating fault here are the self-same people who are telling us that we are bad for trying to impose structure. Creepy sociologists telling us how to lead our lives without the benefit or burden of laws or structure and then blaming us when things inevitably spiral out of control. Their facilitators? The New York Times (news media), academics (remember the Harvard president kicked out for expressing a view?), and the vast unwashed hairies of the Blue State bloc. Peace. Live and let live. Tolerance. Harmony. Try to understand the Islamic radicals -- don't kill them or send them to Gitmo. Idiots: try and understand this -- they want you dead.

Remember when the whole neighborhood watched over each others' kids? Yes, kids got out of line, but not for very long. And when you found a persistent transgressor, the kid was labeled "a bad one." Recognition that some people are just unable to live according to our society's rules -- and maybe they are just evil. Today, we are terrified of even looking at our neighbors' kids, let alone trying to discipline them. A complete lack of structure. And we wonder how our world got so messed up....