A Picture From the Front

We are in the midst of a culture war.

Hunting is on the decline in the United States, even though it is an essential activity for conservation and wildlife preservation. So-called “animal rights” groups are delighted, apparently unable to understand the basic issues behind preserving populations of wild animals in the world today.

There are a few reasons why the number of hunters is on the wane, but most people would agree that the one factor which has the greatest impact is that fewer fathers are teaching their children to hunt. Hunting is usually a family tradition, and it most often is the foundation of a true understanding of wildlife issues.

Let me show you the worst nightmare of an anti-hunting activist.

That isn’t my family, in case you are wondering. The mom is a friend of mine, and she sent the picture.

It seems that the younger kids were so excited about being out in the woods that they couldn’t sit still. They made so much noise that no one even saw any game. Their dad, the tall fellow pictured above, had to take his oldest son on a later hunt.

Please take a look at the young girl to the left. She was going on her first hunt, and she carefully coordinated her outfit. The pink shirt matches the pink gators on her feet.

It would be less than truthful for me to say that we are winning this particular battle in the culture war. But there is hope.

(Cross posted at Hell in a Handbasket.)

Taking Stock: Nostalgia

Widen the screen just a little, in fact, and a particularly prominent and disturbing lost self can be seen as merely one guest in a room full of permutations, good and bad. And each of those selves must have an idealized doppelgänger of its own. (Benedict Cary’s Times article)

Today we take stock. And here’s a (not always reliable but interesting) social studies take:

A 2003 study at Concordia University in Montreal and the University of California, Irvine, for instance, suggested that young adults who scored high on measures of psychological well-being tended to think of regretted decisions as all their own — perhaps because they still had time to change course. By contrast, older people who scored highly tended to share blame for their regretted decisions. “I tried to reach out to him, but the effort wasn’t returned.”

In New Year’s Cocktail, Benedict Cary discusses the role of regret – at times useful but at others corrosive.

Read more

2008

All the best to my fellow Chicagoboyz contributors and readers! I hope that the coming year leaves you healthy and happy or at least prosperous and contented. Feliz año nuevo, as they say in Japan.

Christmas 4: War Toys

One of life’s many disappointments is that my son has no interest in war toys. So, I did not get to relive my childhood vicariously, with green tanks assaulting lincoln-log forts and swarms of plastic green army men pushing the grey plastic Germans back all the way to their doomed last stand in front of the fireplace. Nope.

Hence I had no one to buy these incredibly cool toy gurkhas for.

Oscar Wilde said youth is wasted on the young. Toys are similarly, to a great extent, wasted on children.

(I recently read this awesome book about the real gurkhas, which I heartily recommend.)