How PC Moonbattery Harms Children and Society
We are creating a generation of precious spoiled brats who think that the whole world owes them everything, and on a silver platter. They must be protected from every unpleasant reality in life, and must be taught that they are the centre of the universe, and nothing amiss or untoward must ever come their way.
The curse of Political Correctness has ensured that we now have pampered zombies walking our streets, who think that they must be immune from anything and everything negative, distressing or difficult. They want assurances that they can float through life untouched, unscathed and uncontaminated by any unpleasantries the world might throw their way.
These mealy-mouthed wimps make life miserable for everyone, and in fact are putting us all at risk. And this mollycoddling starts when we are quite young. Children are being cocooned from real life, whether because of over-zealous parents, or PC-bound bureaucrats.
As one American discussion of this problem said, “School authorities punish kids for hugging a friend, pointing a finger as a pretend gun, or starting a game of tag on the playground. Congress bans starter bikes on the chance that some 12-year-old might chew on a brass valve. Police arrest parents for leaving a sleepy kid alone in the back seat of a car for a few minutes. Yet overprotectiveness creates perils of its own. It robs kids not only of fun and sociability but of the joy of learning independence and adult skills, whether it be walking a city street by themselves or using a knife to cut their own sandwich.”
Examples of this are all around us, and two recent ones which caught my eye are worth mentioning. The first has to do with a medical student in Australia who is afraid of exams. But the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal sided with her against the medical school. As one news item reports:
A medical student who suffers an “extreme” fear of exams has won the right to continue her degree after a tribunal ruled the university discriminated against her because of her mental health disability. The woman, who has a borderline personality disorder and bipolar disorder, had failed to sit written exams and avoided some clinical assessments, particularly in paediatrics and surgery, because of ‘‘extreme anxiety in relation to sitting exams [and] performance assessments’’. The University of Newcastle declined to grant the woman an extension of time to complete her Bachelor of Medicine after she had only completed three-and-a-half years of course work in an eight-year period, the maximum time allowed.
Hey, what about me? I have extreme fear of going to a hospital or clinic where medical practitioners might not be up to scratch, and could even be dangerous to my health, because they have refused to be properly tested, and could be utterly inept and unqualified. Doesn’t my phobia count for anything here?
Or consider another moonbat example of this, also from Australia. Now kids cannot win or lose at sport. Really:
Children will be banned from playing to win, keeping score and best and fairest awards under Australia-wide changes to junior football developed by the AFL. Thousands of junior footballers in up to 150 leagues will be forced to play with no scoreboard, ladders or match results under the shake-up designed to promote participation rather than competition…. AFL national development manager Josh Vanderloo said the new rules had been drafted in consultation with leagues to give children “an enjoyment philosophy rather than a winning philosophy’’.
Yeah right. The article ends this way: “Laurimar Junior Football Club tried the changes on Sunday, putting under-10 player’s through their paces with revised rules. Club vice president Andrew Jamieson said children were ‘not very happy’. The AFL drafted the new guidelines in conjunction with Deakin University research.”
Of course they wouldn’t have been very happy. What a joke. And all so typical here: some eggheads at a university dreamed all this foolishness up. Guess they were having a quiet day. The good news is, not everyone was thrilled with this PC moonbattery.
Many spoke against it. Lauren Rosewarne for example wrote this: “God forbid that we allow a ball game to subtly teach kids anything about the pain of loss, the thrill of victory or the necessity for improvement. Adults, as they get ever-close to the grave, have a tendency to idealise their childhoods to the point of farce. I have an uncle, for example, whose own youth apparently involved nothing other than cheap lollies, yabbying and whittling cricket bats out of old planks of wood.”
Or as Wendy Touhy said:
There is one inescapable fact about sport—as about many aspects of life, like it or not. It is a competition in which you play to win. And while the new AFL codes for junior footballers are no doubt aimed at getting more kids to have a go, stripping the competitive element from the game is just another version of cotton-wooling…. But the point is this: losing is a healthy and normal part of life and it’s a huge mistake to rob children of the chance to experience it. Kids absolutely have to learn to lose in order to learn to recover, it leads to that most over-exposed of qualities that every parent will have heard a hundred times at school pastoral care talks: resilience. We can’t shield kids from a necessary reality like disappointment.
She concludes, “If you remove the competitive aspect of footy, then you take away one of the key things it can teach you about participation and about life: things don’t always go your way. You just have to learn to live with it.”
But since when has Political Correctness ever been concerned about real life, or reality? It is all about creating a world of un-reality. And we all suffer as a result.
http://www.cato.org/multimedia/events/quit-bubble-wrapping-our-kids
http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/university-discriminated-against-medical-student-with-extreme-fear-of-exams-20140401-35vty.html
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/no-scoreboard-ladder-or-match-results-for-junior-footballers-under-changes-to-be-unveiled-by-afl/story-fni0fit3-1226869120535
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-04-01/rosewarne-bubble-wrapping-childhood-footy-style/5357356
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/theperch/index.php/heraldsun/comments/of_course_kids_should_play_to_win/
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“… We are creating a generation of precious spoiled brats who think that the whole world owes them everything …”
Bill these spoiled brats were created back in the 50’s n 60’s – They are us!!!
The thugs who exist now are their grandchildren!!!
PC = Perverse Culture
Hey Bill, Talk about being super-protective of children! Did you know that a parent can be arrested for allowing his/her child to duck into the shopping centre to grab a carton of milk? That is a law in Queensland. I’m not sure if the child’s age is less than 10 or what – it’s a while since I saw the news item when I lived up there. A man was arrested and heavily fined for sending his son in to grab some milk. That’s moon-battery.
Bill, I recently heard that two Year 7 high school students refused to take part in their school’s traditional camping trip to the Warrumbungles National Park in NSW because they didn’t think they could live for the three or four days without internet access. True. What sort of parents do these children have?
This photo of the Warrumbungles shows how grand and majestc the park is: http://www.geomaps.com.au/scripts/warrumbungle.php
All my children camped at the Warrumbungles in Year 7 and the memories have remained with them forever. One son who lives in WA even keeps going back whenever he comes east.
Bill, may I plead anonymity for this particular post.
You are spot on Bill, parents are confused and it shows! Child worship is epidemic, something that I fail to recall from my childhood in the 50’s and 60’s. Back then the family unit was more likely to be a mum and a dad and two, three kids or more; the mum at home and the dad the breadwinner.
Children might have been taught to be seen and not heard, they might have had a clip around the ear for talking back, but they learned respect that way and were never in any doubt about who was running the show. They knew it wasn’t them!
Until parents take their responsibility more seriously, nothing can change. The culture is one of blame and looking for deep and meaningful reasons why your life choices are the fault of anyone else but you. It might have been your upbringing, your education, your unfulfilled emotional needs, someone’s failure to please and appease you. Poor petal.
I was not a spoiled brat and I made darned sure my children were not either. It’s a choice we all have, one that most resist taking; accepting responsibility and bringing children up to serve, not be served; to know they are not the centre of the universe; to know how to think and how to work. It’s not rocket science.
As for a doctor not taking exams??? Maybe they chose the wrong profession? Maybe none of us will ever be desperate enough to need THAT doctor? Maybe her services could be reserved exclusively for the members of the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal and their families?
Bless you Bill, always giving food for thought
Lynn
It’s also part of the insane self esteem movement
Thanks for a good article Bill.
Wow, I hope that woman is only ever put as a coroner and not given the extremely stressful task of actually looking after live patients. What happens if she has a bad day at the clinic and snaps and kills someone with a misdiagnosis?
As for the sport thingy, I never actually played sports as a kid (my father thought it a waste of his precious money), so never got to see the win/loose side of things. Mind you my big brother made up for that but beating the snot out of me on an almost daily basis, so I learnt to rely on myself and the Lord, and developed a really nasty right uppercut.
Oh well, we just need to shake the dust off our sandals, whilst calling out for those who want to get out of the darkness. Just treat the world like a sinking ship, we are in God’s life boats, which have room for everyone who wants to get on board, and call out for them to get on board and be saved from themselves, the world, and moonbattery.
Thankfully, the Lord will return very soon (otherwise we will be at rest earlier).
Neil Waldron.
Yes sadly this is the case today particularly in the Western world. Spoilt brats who have a sense of entitlement and who think they are owed everything and expect to have everything given to them, this is so typical of todays selfish self centred and self absorbed generation.
Bill: I agree with everything in this article, with the exception of the part about allowing children to walk city streets alone. With all the gangs, pedophiles, sex-traffickers and child-killers roaming the streets these days, I wouldn’t DARE allow my daughter to walk these city streets alone! The world is completely a different place than when I was a little girl, and could “roam all over town” in relative safety. Granted, I came from a small town where “everybody knows everybody”, but now big cities have (unfortunately) replaced most of the small towns. Still…you are absolutely correct about the rest..as per usual. 😉
The idea that children are to be sheltered is not a new one. How a child is brought up has an effect on character and who they will become. During World War II Kids were brought up knowing the extreme sacrifices made on their behalf. They became afraid to fight and as a response they wouldn’t take risks. They in turn sheltered their kids. Kids born after the war were sheltered from the turbulence of life and were meant to make good leaders and missionaries.
The whole Idea of self esteem came as a result of abandonment by self absorbed free love generation. Single parent homes and distant fathers led to an abandoned generation that had a problem feeling good about themselves. This prompted people to find a solution to this problem. This is why self esteem came about.
This is an opportunity to say that community values are important and how social issues have led to where we are now. The key points to sell is what will work and what helps the community as a whole. Now is the opportunity to show what went wrong and what can work.
I think it is important to note that the Tribunal has ruled that this student may be allowed to continue taking classes & sitting exams, not that she may be allowed to graduate & practice without taking classes & sitting exams.
UoN policy is that you can take time off of med school and/or repeat failed classes, which adds length to the time it takes to complete your degree, however you MUST finish your medical degree within 8 years. They have chosen to extend this time for other students but not for this student. The Tribunal ruled that this is discrimination & that she be allowed to finish the last 1.5 years of her degree.
So in summary: The Tribunal’s ruling means she’s being allowed to resit her classes & exams. She is not being passed without resitting them.
Thanks Amanda. But my point remains of course. If she has all these major issues in her life, I would not want to be her patient. I value living too much!