Traditional versus present Day

I was brought up in the 1950s when everything was more traditional. If a boy was demonstrating adulthood by 4 to 6 he was given a gun and bullets and kept these in his bedroom or over the Fireplace mantle in case animals or people were endangering his family. I was given my first gun and bullets like this at age 8 but my father was given a gun at 6 and his little brother was given a 6 shot .22 pistol at 4 also and my Dad's older brother was given a shotgun to hunt dove and other game for the family to eat since they usually lived out in the country in a forest somewhere because this is what my grandfather liked to do: hunting for food on weekends when his workday was over. My Grandfather was born in the 1870s I believe. I think one grandmother was born in the 1870s in Williams Texas and one grandmother was born in Philadelphia in 1888 but was raised in Clydebank (near Glasgow) in Scotland when the family's house burned down in Philadelphia. But eventually all the children (10 or 12 moved back to the U.S. first to Nebraska in the early 1900s as adults around 1910 or so.

I was thinking now about decision making as I was raised.
First, children were to be seen but not heard. In other words you were not supposed to speak to adults unless something was wrong or you had an important question otherwise you might be slapped in the face or the butt. This was the way things were for most people in the 1950s that I knew then. But, when a boy was given a gun (a hunting rifle usually) with bullets to keep in his room to protect the family and himself with he was then allowed to talk more at the dinner table because by being given a gun and bullets it meant he was trusted to protect the family and he could then begin to participate in dinner talks where most useful bigger or smaller decisions were made in a family when I grew up.

But now, women are just as likely to be the decision makers for a family as men are and children of all ages tend to be infantilized (treated like babies and infants) and told politically correct things that might get them killed or at least very confused as adults in the real world.

So, mothers especially infantalize boys to the point where many remain dysfunctional for life here in the U.S.

But, the point of this article is none of this:

I realized just now that it is not a disadvantage for women to have equal say as men in our culture because it is sort of like how armies when officers were shot in Europe, the soldiers used to just run away.

But, we changed all that in the U.S. by creating "Chain of Command" from officers down to privates we had someone always in charge and we would never run away and often won battles and wars because of this tenacious quality of American soldiers in battle.

IN other words if we were fighting for something usually there was a reason we all were fighting that group at least  something those fighting on our side believed in. So, we were never going to give up to the very last man dead or wounded. So, this terrified other armies and navies around the world because all we had to do was to shoot their officers and often they would surrender because they were useless without officers because often the men below officers had no vested interest in any war they were fighting in really.

So, when men and women become trained often as they are now (especially regarding critical thinking in College) Women become trained to be capable of making the really big decisions.

It's not that there are not problems with this too because as soon as women started to do this they started to have all the health problems men have too starting in their 40s and onward.

I think the main problem for men my age is we were never trained to make the little detail decisions about things like going to the doctor and staying alive. We were so trained that we were expendable and we were likely going to die in a nuke or battle somewhere that if men my age don't have a woman taking care of them they are dead by 50 or 60. This seems at least for men the problem of being someone of my generation.

Because generally being trained to be soldiers and to give up our lives for the greater good we are not therefore good at keeping ourselves alive much past 40 or 50. This was how public schools were when I grew up. Fighting was allowed in order to make young men tough enough to give up their lives for their countries in battle by 18 to 20 years of age when they were drafted.

If you did not prepare to be drafted and to fight and die by 18 or 20  then everyone knew you would be the first to die in a real battle anywhere on earth. And this was true of ALL young men in the 1950s and 1960s when I grew up.

1. Conscription in the United States - Wikipedia

   en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_the_United...

   Conscription in the United States, commonly known as the draft, has been employed by the federal government of the United States in four conflicts: the American Civil ...