By Selwyn Duke

Huck Finn must be spinning in his literary grave.  Just recently a Colorado Springs, Co., elementary school banned tag during recess, joining other schools that have prohibited this childhood pastime.  Upon hearing this, I thought about the movement to ban cops and robbers, musical chairs, steal the bacon, and the kill-joys’ most frequent target and this writer’s favorite childhood school game, dodge ball.  Then there’s the more inane still, such as the decision by the Massachusetts Youth Soccer Association to prohibit keeping score in kids’ tournament play. 

There are many ways to describe this trend.  One might say it’s a
result of the left’s antipathy toward competition, the increasing
litigiousness of the day, or the inordinate concern with self-esteem
and hurt feelings.  Then, if I am to speak only of my feelings, the
word stupid comes to mind.  Really, though, regardless of whether the
motivations are good or ill or the reasoning sound or not, at the end
of the day I find a conclusion inescapable.  Slowly, incrementally,
perversely, boyhood is being banned.

Make no mistake, the aforementioned examples are not isolated social
accidents but part of a pattern.  Recently I was talking to a friend
who has two young sons, and he mentioned how he bought their toy
machine-gun and revolver at a garage sale.  He and his wife remarked
about how it was the only way to find realistic-looking toy guns
nowadays, the kind that were staples of Boydom when I was a lad.  Oh,
toy guns can still be seen – that is, when they aren’t prohibited by
crime-ridden cities or crazy moms – but they don’t resemble anything
John Wayne would have wielded.  Often misshapen, more and more they
come only in colors that, well, men aren’t known for being acquainted
with, ones that some would describe as “girly.”

Getting back to the People’s Republic of Massachusetts’ soccer league,
it was so concerned about the poor little eggs’ feelings that it also
decided no one should get trophies.  This isn’t unusual, as the
practice of awarding trophies to all or none is now often adopted, lest
a tear run down a cherubic face.  Moreover, frowning upon competition –
which boys thrive on – isn’t limited to frivolous pursuits, as schools
increasingly dispense with merit-based academic models in favor of
schemes such as “Outcome Based Education” (it’s nothing like what it
sounds). 

No doubt some will chide me for casting these preferences as being
characteristically male.  Sure, not every boy craves competition any
more than every girl eschews it, but the sexes are different.  Boys
love games, sports and locking horns; they love hierarchies and
high-fives; they love guns, soldiers and shoot-‘em-up games.  Namely,
they love things that are slowly being taken away from them or
curtailed.

As I indicated earlier, there are many reasons why we’ve departed from
sanity.  The threat of litigation is real, and this article cites the
case of seven-year-old Heather Lindaman, whose parents are suing their
school because she broke her elbow while playing a variation of dodge
ball.  The opponents of such games use cases like Lindaman’s to
buttress the assertion that they are too dangerous for children.  I’ll
only say that this is hogwash – as all activities entail risk – because
it’s irrelevant to my main point.  Regardless of why these prohibitions
are instituted, the end result is the same: Boys’ passions are being
exiled.  Dangerous?  You may as well just say that boyhood is
dangerous. 

Of course, we could do what one school that banned dodge ball did:
Switch to yogic exercises.  Wow!  And liberals say that conservatives
are no fun?  Why is it that the most childish understand childhood the
least?

While leftists may be childish, they conjure up pseudo-intellectual
reasons for their social engineering like seasoned psycho-babblers.
Tag leads to “conflict on the playground” and some students being
chased “against their will,” said Cindy Fesgen, assistant principal of
the Discovery Canyon Campus in Colorado Springs (my discovery is that
the school is run by lunkheads).  Dodge ball is emotionally damaging to
less athletic children; it “hurts their self-esteem” is how it’s
usually put.  David Limbaugh wrote about this attitude at WorldNetDaily:

Diane Farr, a curriculum specialist in Austin, Texas, explained that
her school district implemented the [dodge ball] ban to satisfy a panel
of professors, students and parents who wanted to ‘preserve the rights
and dignity’ of all students in the district. So dodge ball is a
dignity thief? Of course, claims Farr. ‘What we have seen is that it
does not make students feel good about themselves.’

There’s more. According to one anti-dodge ball crusader, ‘at its base,
the game encourages the strong to victimize the weak. … Schools preach
the values of harmony, community and cooperation. But then those same
schools let the big kids loose to see if they can hit the skinny nerd
in the head with a hard, red rubber ball.’

Call me crazy, but the people who disgorge these notions just must have
been skinny nerds.  That is, the variety without the brains or ambition
to be Bill Gates.

Limbaugh continues,

“Educators also fear that dodge ball is not only violent, but that it and other games convey ‘a message of violence.’

‘With Columbine and all the violence that we are having, we have to be careful with how we teach our children,’ says Farr.”

We certainly do, and that’s why we should keep them far from Farr and
her ilk.  These crackpots are just a few degraded brain cells away from
saying (about football) that “violent ground acquisition games are a
neo-fascist metaphor for war.” 

Just as outrageous as these prohibitions is the persecution of hapless
lads who run afoul of them.  Limbaugh wrote of this as well:

The Washington Times recently detailed a litany of examples, including:
a threatened suspension in California of a 9-year-old for playing cops
and robbers, two New York 2nd-graders suspended and criminally charged
with making terrorist threats for pointing paper guns and saying, ‘I’m
going to kill you,’ and a 9-year-old New Jersey boy suspended and
ordered to undergo psychological evaluation because he told another
student that he planned to shoot a classmate with spitballs.

Could it be any clearer?  They are diagnosing normal boyhood behavior
as a psychological problem.  After all, even if little boys don’t have
toy guns, how many won’t point a stick or their finger at you and say
“Bang, bang, you’re dead!”?  It’s also interesting to note that the
very same people who will lecture us for not subscribing to the notion
that homosexual behavior is innate and healthy will swear that this
normal boyish behavior is learned and destructive.

Then there is that which is truly destructive.  It’s something dark, a
motivation, lurking in the hearts of many who advocate this insanity.
To wit: There is an increasingly common antipathy for all things male,
especially in academia.  This attitude was highlighted by Christina
Hoff Sommers in her book The War Against Boys.  Sommers cites feminists
such as Carol Gilligan, who believes that we should, as Sommers relates
it, “. . . civilize boys by diminishing their masculinity,” and lesbian
Gloria Steinem, who counsels us to “Raise boys like we raise girls.”
And in this category I would also put certain “men” – and I use the
term loosely – such as Harvard psychologist William Pollock, who wrote
the book Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood.
Really, our children do need to be rescued from myths, but they’re not
of boyhood.

We should also realize that education has increasingly become a
feminine domain.  While in 1982 there were 1.4 female teachers for
every male, now the figure is 2.1.  This is not to imply that the
fairer sex can’t have a sound teaching philosophy, but the fact is that
far too many young women today are in the grip of feminist dogma.
Moreover, the type of women who become teachers is also an issue; for
instance, let us consider graduates with degrees in Women’s Studies.
Such people are almost exclusively women, and since there aren’t many
careers available to those with such illustrious qualifications, many
of these ideologues decide to teach.

And the problem with such individuals is that – just as an Afrocentrist
views matters through the prism of race and a Jihadist through that of
believers versus infidels – they tend to see everything as a battle of
the sexes.  In their minds, the ever-present “patriarchy” will only be
vanquished and women liberated (of course, they will never see this as
having been achieved) once boys are sufficiently reprogrammed.
Masculine traits that may enable boys to be dominant must be quashed,
because otherwise they may dominate women.  These are people like
Swedish politician Gudrun Schyman, a feminazi who said that Swedish men
(perhaps the most hen-pecked in the world) were like the Taliban.  The
truth is that the women in question are the Femiban.      

Many will protest, of course, insisting that anti-male bias doesn’t
rule their minds.  And perhaps it doesn’t in some cases.  But their
hearts are a different matter, as these biases aren’t always so
conscious; rather, it’s more a matter of visceral dislike, a feeling.
The liberals in question see masculine symbols and behavior and feel an
aversion, in much the same way a person with a fear of heights may get
a queasy feeling upon seeing airplanes or tall buildings.  So,
unwilling to confront their prejudices, they manufacture excuses.
Dodge ball is dangerous, cops and robbers is violent, musical chairs is
exclusive, tag terrorizes.  If only they would be intellectually honest
and reveal their true feelings: Boys are bad.

Perhaps this is why these social engineers will see a bevy of
boisterous boys and want to douse their masculinity with Ritalin.
After all, it’s the closest they can get to their preferred solution,
as it isn’t yet legal to turn them into eunuchs.